THE OLDER GENERATION

November 23, 2020

My cousin's daughter has been posting photos and other documents to Facebook that she found in her mother's files.  Like this picture, which is the only picture ever taken of my mother's whole family.

(That's my mother in the pink shirt with the brown top.  Someone colorized this photo, which was originally b/w.  Peach's mother is to her right and Kathy's mother is to her left.)

There is a private family group on Facebook and more younger people in the family are logging into it.

These are photos and documents that I've seen before, but are new to the younger generations, and those who really want to know more about the family are always asking for people to be identified so they know who is who.  If I write anything about my mother, I have to be sure to identify who my mother is.

As I was looking through these documents today it occurs to me that with my mother, of the first generation, not really functional any more, I have essentially become the "older generation."

It's a strange feeling!  I have been the niece, the cousin, the younger one all of my life, but with Peach gone, there are only two other cousins about my age, both of them men who don't participate in the family group.  Everybody else in the family is either a younger cousin (only a couple of those) or third or fourth generation family.  Two of my cousin Shirley's daughters are very active in the group and I know one of them pretty well, so they seem like cousins, not a different generation...but they ARE a different generation.

It's strange to tell stories about things I've heard all my life, hoping I have the details right, and have them be brand new family lore to these third and fourth generation people.  I'm a bad one to be the surviving 2nd generation because I didn't know the rest of the family as well as my other cousins did, but I'm now in the position of making up family lore from whatever I remember and having it become fact, passed down to the younger generations.

With my own memory becoming more unreliable, I'd better get all the stories out before I lose them!
 

We bought corn for the squirrels today and they loved it.  This guy managed to pick this cob up, carry it across the patio and up a tree until he got about halfway up, when he dropped it.  I haven't seen it since, so I don't know what he did after he dropped it.