Some families keep their history alive around picnic tables, their roots watered each summer by laughter, shared meals, and stories that stretch back generations.
Mine did not.
On my mother’s side, there were no great migrations back home for a weekend, no sea of matching shirts declaring our kinship, no annual roll call of who had been born, married, or passed on.
I didn’t grow up with the smell of charcoal and cousins’ laughter drifting across a summer lawn, the kind of memory stitched into photo albums and passed down like a family recipe. Family reunions simply weren’t our thing. There were no matching T-shirts, no group photos under a banner.
The closest I came to that sense of gathering was at Chicago block parties. We’d shut down the street, our banquet hall, line the sidewalks with tables and sizzling grills, and open the fire hydrant so the water arched into the air like a silver ribbon. Kids ran barefoot through a cracked-open hydrant, laughing because this time, no one called the police.
Music pulsed from speakers, and for one day, neighbors felt like cousins, and the whole block became family.
But it wasn’t our family.
Six years ago, this ended with our generation.
What began as a simple backyard barbecue has grown, year after year, into something bigger that we can finally call by its true name: a Family Reunion.
It’s a strange and humbling thing to realize we’re the aunts and unks now—the ones setting the tone, carrying the stories, and shaping the memories for our children.
We’ve rewritten the narrative we inherited.
Many of us are building marriages we’re proud of, raising children under our own roofs, and pursuing careers that light us up. We are not lost to the streets, not numbed by addiction, not absent from the lives we brought into this world.
Instead, we have passports now. We take our children to see oceans they’ve never touched, mountains they’ve never climbed, cities that speak in languages they’ve never heard. We give them richer experiences, not just with our words but with our lives.
Sometimes, breaking from tradition can be a good thing!
The PBS Blog 