Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 29, 1994 TAG: 9408300013
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Once before we had a visiting gang of turkeys. That was in the early spring of a winter of devastating snows. Those turkeys, shy as virgins, slipped across the sun-swept crests of pasture hills, picking through the scraps of hay the cows had left.
This year's turkeys seem to have been brought out by the winter's weather, too, but they're bolder. They love the dense and brushy devastation that the ice storms left on all our south-facing slopes.
Occasionally, on walks in the woods, I've flushed them out of a hollow that's littered with fallen pines and overgrown grape vines. Whoosh! and they're gone. But once, early in the summer, I came upon them in the driveway. That day, the chicks were still learning to fly. So a few flew, but most hopped across the mud puddles over which their mothers had easily swooped.
Yesterday afternoon, the whole bunch were browsing through the cemetery just down from the house. They didn't look like hens and chicks anymore. Just a gang of turkeys, out for the afternoon.
Time flies.
Over the weekend, Mama and her sister gathered together their two broods for a family picnic. It used to be, we cousins spent most of our summers together. But since we've grown and scattered, we see each other seldom. At weddings, funerals, once in a while at Christmas. We come together at times of loss and change, foraging for our histories.
This time it was just for fun. Nearly all of us there, too. With a bunch of new chicks fluttering around: the oldest of the new ones nearly 12, the youngest just turned 3.
I, the oldest of the first cousins, spent most of the time awestruck. Sometimes I thought I was watching ghosts. The children now are so like the children their parents were.
And then, in the twinkling of an eye, the children who are, indeed, children now would show themselves to be themselves, and no one else at all. Steady, beautiful, talented, graceful and brave; full of fun and plans and expectations all their own.
The twinkling blue-eyed blonde (who looks so like her grandmother), watching a bunch of the boys in the rowboat, turned to me and said, "Brothers are so silly sometimes."
I said, "Aren't they, though?"
She laughed. What did I know of brothers?
"Really!" I said. "I have a brother." And pointed him out: the tall one over there, wearing the Hawaiian shirt.
But she didn't believe me. I could see it in her face. "That man?"
She didn't believe, either, that her mother is my cousin. Cousins are kids. Kids who hate, universally, being told they look just like their moms, their dads, their grannies, their grandpapas.
But cousins aren't only kids. And they do look just like somebody.
They do, and they don't.
And, of course, in the twinkling of an eye, they change.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB