So why do families hold family reunions? What compels us to spend a day or two with people we are bound to not by proximity or mutual interests but by a shared ancestry which gives us at least one thing in common?

Belonging to a family that fiercely believes in holding annual family reunions, I’ve attended decades’ worth, the memories stretching back beyond my remembering. Considering the question of what annually brings us back together, the main reasons used to be the food and the stories.

Sadly, this year’s reunion that just concluded involved store-bought pizzas carried to the park picnic tables in cardboard boxes. I know for a fact that a few aunts were turning over in their graves because of that food choice. These are the aunts who used to open the trunks of their cars to unload large pans of steaming fried chicken to those picnic tables. Next came huge canning pots of corn on the cob, cooked and ready to be grabbed, buttered, salted and gobbled. Again and again.

Those picnic tables shouldered platters of watermelon wedges that appeared under swift, sharp knife strokes, alongside platters of fresh tomato slices also produced on site. Next to appear were baking pans full of hot rolls, their aroma making us impatient for the too-long prayer on the food to begin. And finally, slabs of homemade chocolate cakes slathered with homemade chocolate frosting. That menu was as consistent as our shared genealogy.

After that banquet satisfied our hunger, the kids skittered off to the playground. The adults hung around the tables to chat, reminisce, catch up and eventually begin the stories — the “Remember when…” tellings that made heroes of ordinary people whose blood we shared. As we grew older, our appeal for the swings waned while our fascination for these people — our people — grew.

Naturally, we’re pulled in first by the more adventurous stories, the ones about bear attacks, logging disasters, narrow misses, runaway wagons, gunpowder and anvils, chicken coop predators, summers of drought and winter blizzards that buried houses and barns to their eaves, and infrequent deadly plagues that left most families with at least one headstone to visit in the small town cemetery.

Some of the stories come out annually, often embellished through repeated narrations. Some are one-ups that appear only once, either burned into our memories or lost forever.

Listening to the experiences of pioneer ancestors who settled the very town in which we sit changes us, somehow improves us. We ponder what it took to wrestle barren land into the tidy blocks of green and growing life spread before us and wonder how on earth we live up to such a legacy.

The food — whatever today’s modern offerings may be — feeds our bellies. But the stories feed our souls. They breathe life into the humans who are the reason we walk the earth today — the people whose very existence created our existence.

As we listen — back then and now — we begin to realize the significance of our place in the unfolding of the generations. Those sage elders whose mouths form the stories are, themselves, the subjects of the stories our own mouths will someday form. We are the generation who the youngsters dangling from the monkey bars will someday memorialize with their tales of our deeds.

That realization humbles and compels us, makes us bravely aware that our inheritance gives us not only a past to be proud of, but a trove of family stories to guard, preserve and share, and a future to build.

And family reunions to hold.

D. Louise Brown lives in Layton. She writes a biweekly column for the Standard-Examiner.

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