• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Verissima Productions

Massachusetts Videographers, Artists & Designers

  • Home
  • About
  • Services
    • Personal Histories: Videos
    • Business Histories
    • Organizations
    • You Can Take It With You:
      Histories of Places & Things
    • Broadcast & Educational
    • Legacy Conversations
    • Personal Histories: Books
  • Process
  • Newsletter & Blog
    • Newsletter
    • Life Preservers Blog
    • Life Preservers Podcast
  • Subscribe
  • Reviews
  • Contact

Re-Unions

August 10, 2012

August seems to be a favorite month for families to reunite. Years ago, I remember

multiple Italian relatives who had come from the same village in Italy, descending

on my grandfather’s modest farm in Naperville, Illinois. Baseball games, card games

going on late into the night, Neapolitan dialect flying above my head like exotic

birds.

 

My African American friends often took the bus or the train south from Chicago, and

stayed a month or more with the ‘grans’ and the aunts, and the uncles who had not

chosen to migrate north. They returned with stories of farm life and delicious food

and family togetherness.

 

There are so many ways for re-unions to happen. Sometimes these meetings are

joyous because years of separation—through war or death or disappearance—

have kept people apart. I think of the Jewish communities after World War II,

when reunions with family members were almost miraculous, or the reunion of an

adopted child with a birth parent, which might bring unexpected happiness, or a

decision not to continue the relationship.


When you are relaxing and sipping a cool drink during these “dog days” of August,

what are your reunion memories, sweet and bittersweet? What do you think about

re-unions in general? With old friends, with distant family, with groups that have

meant a lot to you such as service groups or sororities?

 

Here are two poems, both about Aunts, that raised thoughts of reunions for me.

 

Aunt
By Al Young

She talks too loud, her face

a blur of wrinkles & sunshine

where her hard hair shivers

from laughter like a pine tree

stiff with oil & hotcombing

 

O & her anger realer than gasoline

slung into fire or lighted mohair

She’s a clothes lover from way back

but her body’s too big to be chic

or on cue so she wear what she want

People just gotta stand back &

take it like they do Easter Sunday when

the rainbow she travels is dry-cleaned

 

She laughs more than ever in spring

stomping the downtowns, Saturday past

work, looking into JC Penney’s checking

out Sears & bragging about how when she

feel like it she gon lose weight &

give up smoking one of these sorry days

 

Her eyes are diamonds of pure dark space

& the air flying out of them as you look

close is only the essence of living

to tell, a full-length woman, an aunt

brown & red with stalking the years

 

Don’t say a word, but they look at each other

As down from the hill comes Jill, comes Jack.

The children are back. The children are back.

The Aunts

By Joyce Sutphen 

I like it when they get together

and talk in voices that sound

like apple trees and grape vines,

 

and some of them wear hats

and go to Arizona in the winter,

and they all like to play cards.

 

They will always be the ones

who say “It is time to go now,”

even as we linger at the door,

 

or stand by the waiting cars, they

remember someone—an uncle we

never knew—and sigh, all

 

of them together, like wind

in the oak trees behind the farm

where they grew up—a place

 

I remember—especially

the hen house and the soft

clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

2010, First Words

 

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Verissima Productions

(617) 629-5999
info@verissima.com

Subscribe to Our Monthly Newsletter

Copyright © 2020 Verissima Productions

Join Our Mailing List