long-lost cousins

Yesterday I had lunch downtown with my cousin Corri.

I’d never met her before.

It seems impossible, in this Internet age, that I didn’t know I had a cousin living 20 miles from me, that we wouldn’t have found each other through some combination of Facebook and Google and other family members telling us about one another. But until last month, when Corri flew to Missouri for Mimi’s funeral and ran into my parents, she had no idea I lived in the Boston area. Me? I was clueless until she found me on Facebook the following week. And yesterday we finally met up for lunch, and marveled at the wonder of finding each other.

“I think we share the most wonderful family in the world,” Corri wrote to me in that initial Facebook message. And yesterday, it was such fun to compare notes on different members of that family, and talk about the places where our branches intersect. Our grandmothers were sisters; our dads are first cousins; I’m not sure if that makes us second cousins or first cousins once removed or whatever, but I know it makes us family. She remembers my grandpa as “Lefty,” his longtime nickname; I have vague memories of her grandmother, Nina, from when I was very small. My dad and his brothers idolized her dad, who was the cool older cousin (and quite the college basketball star in his day). Corri hadn’t seen my parents in thirty years until last month, but she remembers them visiting her family in Colorado when she was a child.

My Mimi had a large collection of costume jewelry (one of her many collections, which also included teacups, Sunshine Biscuit tins, shoes, canned goods, and funky antiques). All the women of the family chose a piece to wear at her funeral, and got to keep them afterward. And yesterday Corri gave me the piece she had chosen to wear: a small pin made of green stones in the shape of a butterfly. She could not have known that green is one of my favorite colors – nor that Margaret (who had the idea of everyone wearing Mimi’s jewelry at the funeral) was particularly fond of butterflies.

I am grateful, today, for the warmth of family – for the bond that immediately draws people together, no matter if they’ve never met before. I’m grateful for green butterfly pins and first-time-reunions and good talk over salad and soup. And I’m thrilled to have made another connection, another place to know and be known.

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