1-3 August 2026

Last weekend I had the pleasure of hosting houseguests I didn’t really know and discovering over the course of a little more than a day a surprising but profound connection that belies the literal relationship of first cousins once and twice removed.  Undaunted by the bad luck of a rental car with a tire leaking air, they arrived on Saturday evening eager to connect and more than capable of hatching a plan to address that hiccup without compromising our one full day together on Sunday.

I had written to and spoken with Erin, my cousin Barbara’s daughter, before, but never met her husband Steve or daughter Azalea.  Nevertheless, by the time we’d working our way through the guacamole—first course of the quasi Mexican dinner I’d planned—the talk flowed comfortably.  Was it the Midwestern roots we had in common?  Or my delight in recovering the childhood admiration I’d had for my Senseman cousins, the “Big Girls” two and four years older than me, always beautifully groomed and dressed by their glamorous beautician mother, my wonderful Aunt Mart, seeing their good looks and charm reflected in Erin?  Or maybe it was just the joy of seeing loving parents ease their clever daughter into overcoming the strangeness of new acquaintance and surroundings?  Whatever the charm, it took.

We “did” the Portsmouth area, plunged in the chilly Atlantic waters off Great Island Common in New Castle, and enjoyed the classic family seafood restaurant Warren’s in Kittery.

We looked through family photos so carefully annotated and researched by my mother Virginia, we played the piano together, and Azalea demonstrated her Irish step dancing moves.  By the time they departed after Monday’s breakfast, I felt I’d discovered the family I’d been missing, dispelling that last-of-the-Mohicans, no-one-else-knows-the-family-stories isolation haunting me ever since the deaths of my parents and younger sister.  To serve dinner on the table I inherited from my grandparents to their great- and great-great granddaughter—the table on which Grandpa Cecil had helped me with my algebra—and at the same time discover how much I liked them all, was a thrill.

So, here’s to the family romance—sometimes actually a tale with a happy ending.