MARY SCHULKEN
Emma would have been 120 this birthday. She lived nearly 100 of those years. At the end, her tiny, soft body gave no clue she birthed 12 children and raised them in the clenched fist of the Great Depression.
You'd think such a life would be long forgotten. You'd think the time gone by would make feeding people and loving children unbearably quaint, like a rural days exhibit in some countryside museum.
Yet every June, on the first Sunday, a couple hundred of us with an echo of Emma in our eyes get together and break bread.
There's nothing remarkable about the Fletcher family reunion, which will take place this Sunday in the Oak Grove Ruritan Building just off N.C. 98 in Durham.
Like thousands of family reunions on church grounds, civic buildings and backyards, it is an afternoon of hugging, eating and talking.
There's no protocol and no real organization beyond nominating a president. Here's how it goes: Sometime after church, we all show up. The men set up the tables and chairs and the women line up the casseroles. Someone says a blessing and the line forms. Then it's every Fletcher for him -- or her -- self.
You can count on certain things.
Aunt Pat's banana pudding will be gone before you get your turn.
Either the air conditioning or the ladies' room will be out of order.
Somebody's baby will pull on the tablecloth and cause a small calamity.
Every year, too, the same questions get asked.
The newspaper still treating you good? Been sailing much? How are your mama's eyes?
The answers change very little.
Yes, the newspaper is treating me fine. No, we can't seem to find time to sail. Mama's eyes are good, thank you, since we got the cataracts off.
Nor is there anything remarkable about the family that assembles. They are teachers, police officers, seamstresses, mechanics, executive assistants, cashiers, housecleaners, electricians: the sons and daughters and greats and grands of Emma Fletcher, who was born on a sunny day in June, 1885.
This thing has been going on for more than three-quarters of a century. It started as a way for sons and daughters to celebrate their mother's birthday. Now it's a way for kin who share a thin strand of blood to hold onto a piece of who they are.
The sons and daughters of Emma are down to six. They walk around the reunion with identical shocks of white hair and the same painful joints. They talk about hog killing, pear preserves and hard times.
Their sons and daughters -- Emma's grands -- have sprouted paunches and patches of gray hair. They joke with one another about their parents' ailments, but never take an eye off them.
Their own sons and daughters -- Emma's great-grands and beyond -- are graduates and brides and fathers with brand-new babies. The circle grows wider, not smaller, as the years pass.
My mother, Grace, is a daughter of Emma. I tell people my annual trip to the reunion is for her benefit. Yet as the patch of gray in my hair grows, that story is no longer true. This journey is my own.
Once every year I make potato salad, deviled eggs and ham biscuits. Once every year I take down the plates I have especially for those things, fill them and ready them to travel. Once every year I go to the same place on the same day and, with the same people, hold onto a piece of who I am.
E-mail, instant messaging, satellite phones -- those modern things --can't make that kind of connection. They do not have the power to knit common threads between your life and the lives of others.
Tomorrow, the first Sunday in June, the four people in my own family -- a husband, a mother and his mother -- will journey to the Fletcher family reunion. We will add our small circle to Emma's larger one, and eat, hug and talk. It will be a fattening but satisfying day, laced with things I rarely get. Fried chicken. Chocolate cake from scratch. And, of course, that potato salad and ham biscuits.
My life is nothing like Emma's. Yet her circle -- the circle that began with a long-ago life of feeding people and loving babies -- links us over the years.