Sunday Night Supper

Every Sunday night throughout my childhood, youth, and even young adulthood (long after my mother had died), the Hoods and the Chenoweths ate Sunday night supper together, one week at the Hoods' and the next at the Chenoweths'. The grownups were best friends, and the children came to think of each other as extended family.

In October 2007, my sister-in-law Brenda died accidentally, bringing the second-generation Hoods and Chenoweths together for the first time in many years. Despite my brother David's protestations that he saw no reason for a photograph, I insisted.

We lined up in birth order: my brothers Billy and David, then Chip (Chenoweth) and his sister Emily, then me, and then the baby, Babbie Chenoweth. Despite the difficulty of the occasion just two days after Brenda's death, we laughed as we always have, at dinner and on the steps of David and Brenda's last house.

Billy and Chip repeated the often told story of their flight in Chip's Jeep as they rounded the turn of the bottom of the driveway and shot over the hedges toward the Hendrixes' house. Emily, Babbie, and I argued about whose mother made the three-bean salad that none of us would eat. David and Emily laughed about their wrestling, which ended when David realized Emily was was becoming an adolescent. We all teased Babbie about Miss White's party, which she announced at bedtime (in those days, sheets were only white).

The closeness we took for normal in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s is unusual today, and although three of our parents have died, the evidence of our extended family still lives in us and in the chandelier my father made in December 1963 (just weeks after my mother's death): each of the arms bears the inscribed name of a family member and the death date of one (my mother). Babbie and her husband still have the one-of-a-kind object in their vacation home, where it has hung for 45 years.

We all have the memories and each other.