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Siblings Grow Up in Different Families
Travel always brings new ideas, new insights, and usually memories that linger and feed our souls, and enlighten our minds. My recent two week trip across country by Amtrak to my daughter’s California outdoor wedding also brought me the opportunity to reconnect with my favorite Aunt. My dear Aunt is more like a cousin, as she was the youngest of a family of 12 children, and thus she is closer in age to my older siblings in my family, as I am the youngest of five children. My father was somewhere in the upper six in her family, and there were six girls and six boys.
I had never had the opportunity to visit with this dear Aunt as an adult, and we had a wonderful time connecting again. When I was a small child she was a young wife, traveling the world, bringing us gifts, and telling us wonderful stories of her travels as an Air Force wife. She was able to fill me in on a lot of missing family history, and I was likewise able to help her more fully understand the dynamics of my own family, her nieces and nephews from the remaining Oklahoma relatives. Her childhood and school days were mostly in the Imperial Valley in California, and her college experience was sororities and graduate school.
One of my most startling realizations was when she talked about her childhood. That time for her was so different from what my own father had described as his childhood…
