I am so lucky that despite having an enormous extended family, only a few of them are difficult or dangerous to know.
I’m also very grateful and I count my blessings that my cousin is such a soulmate. Poor thing, she and I are quite alike, which means that when I’m uncomfortable she is, and vice versa, but I value her more than she knows, and I wish she were my sister.
My brothers are difficult, recalcitrant and differently moralled (well, this applies to Big C really) but they’re wonderful to their big sis.
I also take time here to remember H, and A-M, two cousins lost to the family years ago. A-M would have been 32 this year. H I think would have been 36. Had he been with us I would wish him happy. We have such sadness and such a lack of decent communication in the clan, such a will to ignore problems and to paper over cracks, such a fear of a good old air-clearing argument. Gods save us from ourselves!!
