Day 10 - Sikeston, MO - Part Six

While this was my first time in Claudette's house, this all seemed so familiar to me.

We get invited into Claudette's kitchen and we take seats around a large dining table. To accomodate my Mom, we push out the table just a bit so she has room for her legs at the table.

Food starts flying to the table as Claudette acts as a one woman bucket line to get everything on there.

Large bowl of cold fried chicken.

Another bowl of some sort of fried fish (catfish?).

Both regular salad and potato salad.

My diet is going out the window today and I'm okay with it.

This is the type of food that I would have eaten at my grandmother's house as a child.

I don't eat this type of food anymore. I don't seek it out.

But eating this food today is less about taking in fuel.

Eat bite opens up a flood of memories. I can see my grandma fluttering around the kitchen trying to get a huge dinner on the table for all of us.

I haven't thought about Grandma New in a long time.

As lunch begins, so does the arrival of cousins.

Like the invasion at Normandy beach, the cousins keep arriving in waves.

It seems like they never stop arriving.

I can't keep track of who everyone is. I need a scorecard to keep track of everyone.

I've never met them before but they ALL look familiar. I can see the traits that run in my Mom's side of the family. I can pick out which ones look like my the cousins or the aunts that I know.

The majority of the cousins arriving come from my grandma's brother, Claude. I'm still not sure how many children Claude and his wife, Ruth, had but it was in the double digits.

At one point, one of the cousins tells a story that Ruth said she didn't enjoy sex. The punchline was "Well, sombody liked it because she was pregnant for darn near twenty years!"

Another interesting thing happens while we are sitting on the table.

With more cousins arriving than what they have seats for, the cousins rotate on their own so each one of them has the opportunity to sit with myself, my Mom, and Jack. I don't even think they notice that they are doing this. If somebody gets up from a chair, that chair is open and another cousin will take the spot and fill the void.

Another cousin, Linda, arrives and takes a seat next to me. We are introduced and I recognize something in her eyes.

She just did what I've been doing with all of them. She looked at me and saw something VERY familiar.

"John, I can't believe it but you look just like my Daddy."