Cousins on the Couch

Dear Diary,

I have several photographs in the album I am assembling of family groups seated on the couch in my childhood home or my Auntie's home in Brighton.  Dad was always orchestrating these.  Recording the family was a very big deal to him I think because his family lost all their photographs when the farm burned in 1935.  That is why I have no photographs of dad or my aunts and uncles before that date.  I have always called these group shots, "Cousins on the Couch".

Yesterday, at my cousin Susie's summer house on Black Cat Island in New Hampshire it was my turn to orchestrate the group shot.  These are all first cousins of mine...four generations of them!  The oldest is 78 and the youngest is 5.  And, like my father, I am not in the photograph and that is fine with me.  Even the sweet little French bulldog Shelby got into the act.


My extra is Cousins on the Couch, 1956.  Five of those cousins are in today's photograph!  I am seated in the middle.  The little boy on the left, my cousin David, just passed away this week.  One story ended but the rest of us still have chapters to write.