Family. Gathered. Remembered.

My father died soon after it was over in July 1993, but up until then there was always a big family reunion here beginning with the Fourth of July holiday and going on a week or two. Folks from here in the Florida Panhandle, folks from South Carolina, Louisiana, sometimes forty relatives gathered for enormous meals, talking, drinking iced tea, soda pop and beer, little cousins running and playing, boats pulling up out front ... . It slacked off a bit after he died, but people still gather in the area. Tass, Jeremy, Caroline and Charlotte are here from Tallahassee for the long weekend. Malinda and Kristen are right next door, Ray has moved to Orlando. Early afternoon, Joe arrives from North Carolina. Walt and some of his family will be at the beach. Gina lives in PC now, and John and family. 

As we mature and grow, people die and new ones arrive by marriage and birth, generations pass and are replaced, families evolve. Terah the son of Nahor, and his wife raised Haran, Nahor and Abraham in Ur. They moved north to Haran/Charan. Eventually, on God’s call, Abraham and Sarah, with Abraham’s nephew Lot, moved to claim the land of promise. The family is evolving. Eventually Lot fades from the picture. With Sarah’s slave Hagar, Abraham has his first son, Ishmael. On God’s further promise, Isaac is born to Sarah. Ishmael becomes the father of another nation and leaves the story. Wanting to keep ties with family and old country, Abraham sends and finds Rebekah, granddaughter of his brother Nahor, as wife for Isaac. Nahor is by now gone from the family picture. Isaac and Rebekah have twins Esau and Jacob, and the brothers are very different from each other. Esau marries Canaanite women,  becomes the father of the Edomite nation, fading out of the family saga. Jacob marries Leah and Rachel, daughters of his mother Rebekah’s brother Laban, of whom we hear no more. Jacob with his wives and his wives’ servants has twelve sons, a new family. The longest story in Genesis is the story of Jacob’s son Joseph and his adventures. Terah is far, far in the distant past, but remembered in the marvelous family story that is the book of Genesis.

Our family gathering is different now. But sometimes as hectic as ever. We are gathered in a house that A.D. Weller (the next youngest of thirteen children) and Carrie Weller built in 1912-1913 and where they raised five children. Their generations are, as the Bible says, gathered unto their fathers. But one day this week some of us are driving over to Pensacola to visit Saint John’s Cemetery where both my grandparents are buried, my mother’s family in the Gentry plot; and my father’s parents in the Weller plot with their infant daughter Carrie, son Alfred, daughters Evalyn, Ruth, Marguerite. Anamnesis, they are not forgotten.

TW+