I met Cindy for coffee yesterday. I’ve known her for over fifty-six years. We met when we both started 6th grade.
Where I grew up was a farming community of less than a thousand people. Most of the farmers were Catholic, therefore birth control was taboo back then.
Cindy came from a family of eleven children. Cindy has eight children and currently has about forty-seven grandchildren.
When someone asks about my childhood and I start explaining about the large families my friends came from, their eyes widen and their mouthes hang open. I went thru this with my husband last night.
He’s never met Cindy but he’s heard me talk about her. We don’t see each other that often…just once every couple of years to catch up. The conversation started because my coffee visit with Cindy lasted almost 5 hours. He wanted to know what the hell we could talk about for that long.
Well, Cindy and I both love to travel so we talked about recent and upcoming trips. Then we talk about middle school, high school, and any updated information on former classmates. And of course we talk about our kids (I have two) and our grandchildren. As I’m explaining this to my husband, his eyes are still bugging out of his head and his mouth is still hanging open. So I decided to have a little fun.
I started out by telling him that Cindy isn’t my only friend that came from a large family. My friend, Mary, came from a family of nineteen kids and part of those nineteen were five sets of twins. My friend Theresa came from a family of fifteen kids. My friend Cora came from a family of twelve kids.
So, to make things even more interesting, Cindy (family of eleven) married Theresa’s (family of fifteen) brother. By the way, Theresa has eleven children. Don’t know about all the other siblings and how many children they have.
I don’t shake my head or think this is odd, or even think anything about this. This is where and how and who I grew up with. The people that lived ‘in town’ usually had two or three children. It was the farm families that were blessed with large families.
When Cindy’s siblings were marrying into other large families and everybody started having children, there were a lot of duplicate birthdays, lots of cousins, and huge extended families. When there was a baptism planned for a baby, there were other babies in the same family circle who were going to be baptized so they collectively held the party afterwards…at the firehouse. When you take the fire trucks out, there’s lots of room for tables, chairs, food, drinks, etc.
The town I grew up in was the equivalent of Mayberry. Right down to one milkman (Don), one mailman (Herman), and probably only two or three police officers. Where I lived was still dirt roads. The firemen flooded the firehouse parking lot in the winter so we had a place to ice skate. I also skated in my friend Lorna’s cow pasture. There was a penny candy counter at the local drug store. The post office only had one window for transactions. Our address was Rural Route 1, Box 365.
I’m glad I got to share this with all of you because the memories are simply magical.
I was blessed to start my life like this…
Back to Basics 