I’m a camera fanatic. I don’t go anywhere without at least one camera and have annoyed more than a few family members with my requests for picture time. But, with family is pretty as mine, could ya blame me?

How many ‘hello’s’ do you think we say on an average day? month? year? lifetime? How many do we say to the same people every day, and how many do we say to someone for the first time? On the fourth day of our trip, Zac and I said hello for the first time in nine years and the first time as the people we’d grown to become to our cousin, Dillan. I can still clearly remember the last time I’d seen him. It was my eighteenth birthday and his father’s funeral. I think if we’d have known then that it would have been so long without a hello I would have made that last one special. I would have said, “Hi, you’re family. You’ll always be family, and I love you more than you know.” I would have hugged him and his older twin brothers, Brad and Brax, longer. But, we didn’t know, so I didn’t.

For nine years, my family had never quite been able to heal from the loss of Kyle because we’d lost his boys that day too.  I’d felt like a stalker trying to find them through any means necessary, but it seemed like every time I did they’d disappear soon after.  When they finally were old enough to establish online identities (websites, MySpace, IM) they were wary of us and uneager to respond.  We wondered if we’d upset them, if they’d been led to believe we didn’t love them.  These were the thoughts swimming in my head as we drove to see Dillan for the first time.

As arrived where Dillan was working with our other cousin Wynn, deep down I was expecting the 11-year old boy and not the 20-year old man. Yet, even with some many days between our last time together, he was impossible to miss. He was a spitting image of how I remembered his dad, and it took my breath away. Zac, in an effort to break the nervous tension, reached out to shake his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Zac.” Dillan hugged him and said, “I know who you are. We’re family.” Gone was the fear; I just wanted to hug him and never let go.

Over the next few days, we remembered how family we were and made up for years worth of hugs and I love yous.  We listened to Dillan and let him re-introduce himself.  We heard stories of his childhood and what his brothers were up to.  We shared our lives with one another and confessed our fears.  We remembered our favorite stories of his dad and let our hearts heal just a bit with his memory. We laughed too much and slept too little.  It was everything I could have hoped for and more.  As our trip drew near, we exchanged contact information freely and made plans to see each other in the future, and while everything isn’t perfect, I do know that our ‘hellos’ will be much more frequent in the next nine years because like Dillan said, “We’re family.”

Uncle Kyle with Dillan, Bradley, and Braxton (L-R)

There’s a park in Spearfish, SD with a creek running through it and a hatchery and more green than an Arizona girl has ever known what to do with. I was worried with my grandma’s health that we wouldn’t get a chance to dip our toes in the water and visit this spot of so many of my best childhood summer vacation memories. We had picnics in the park with chilled watermelon and laughing cousins. We inner-tubed down that creek one summer day and chased one of my shoes down it another. Yet, somehow in my childhood wonder, I never quite grasped the beauty and serenity of that green oasis. Sometimes it takes returning to such a place as an adult to really cement what it was to you as a child. For a few hours on our last afternoon, we were kids again. We walked in the creek, picnicked in the creek, fed the fish at the hatchery, and enjoyed each other at the creek. Our souls didn’t feel the aches of our adult lives. Our love ones were missed but not mourned. It was the best way to end an amazing experience and remind us exactly who we were together and how no matter what that would never change.

With twelve cousins on my mom’s family between the ages of 28 and 18, it’s no wonder we’re as close as we are.  I mean Wynn is 28; I’m 27.  Zac, Kyle, Evan and Kalan (twins #1) are 25.  Ryan, Brax and Brad (twin #2) are 22.  Jillian and Dillan (not twins) are 20, and Adam is 18.  (Brenna is the 13th AND the baby at 13.)  We grew up together, literally and figuratively.  We’ve attended each other’s high school and college graduations and cried at each other’s weddings.  We call, email, text, MySpace, and Facebook regularly and consider one another more than just family.  So with all of that being said, I probably shouldn’t have a favorite cousin, but I do.  Maybe it’s our love of music or our reliance upon each other during hard times, but as much as I love and adore each of my cousins, Evan is my favorite.

Even as a lil kid Evan had this way about him that just made you wonder if he was a wise, old man trapped in a three-year old’s body.  The story’s been told a hundred times of the early morning when my mom and dad were out sleeping in the bunkhouse one summer when Evan (no more than 3) busted in and asked, “Aunt Jamie, who’s that man sleeping in your bed?”  He’s just that way.  His humor and insight catch you off guard and make you wonder about all he has to say.  It was with great trepidation that I stepped on that plane to fly north and seeing Evan was one of the sole reasons I mustered up some intestinal fortitude and went.

I’ve spent a lifetime treasuring my time with Evan, and this trip was no different.  From the moment he picked us up at the airport until he had Zac, the grandparents, and me laughing so hard we were wheezing at his ‘hairy eyeball’, Ev brought happiness wherever he went.  No other cousin could get away with playing The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” on Grandbob’s acoustic guitar in the living room and have grandma say, “play another one” or pull off the ‘chimo’ look of wool vests, old man beards, and ranching Levi’s.  Without realizing it, he’s just that special.

Of all of the stories I’d love to share with you if I had the time about Ev,  the one I have to tell still causes me to just shake my head and mutter under my breath, “oh, Evan.”  Somewhere on the drive home from the airport during our usual speed catching up, we found ourselves on the subject of dating.  Always the gentleman, he asked about us first.  Zac told him about Victoria, and I tried to change the subject upon the  Laurel’s ‘life, love and other mysteries’ segment of our drive by asking Evan if he had a ’special lady’.  I should have known by his sigh and stammering that this was going to get good.  Apparently, as one of the unclaimed bachelors in SE Montana, Evan was a hot commodity.  The community where he grew up and now returned to live and help his dad ranch was full of family and families he’d known forever, but somewhere in those Montana buttes were two women who had piqued his interest, the new schoolteacher and another girl.

Listening to him talk on that drive, you would have thought if anyone had a chance at catching this boy’s heart it would have been the teacher, but as the details of Bachelorette #2 unfolded, we realized the real story lay there.  Maybe it was in the Levi’s her parents had bought him or the countless calls her mom had made trying to hunt him down to have dinner at their house.  It might have been in their request for him to travel to Wyoming with their family to learn to sheer sheep or how they believed in hands-off courtship (think…. Montana arranged marriages).  But somewhere in the tidbits of information he leaked to us over the next five days, we realized that this way way more serious than even he realized.

The climax of the ‘Evan gets stalked by the Hans’ story came after his mom confessed to him upon returning home from a community women’s banquet that a lady from a nearby town had told her that Evan and B#2 were ‘together’ in that courting/promised kinda way.  Didn’t she know?!?! Always one for rational thought, Evan decided that his best course of action upon realizing he was unknowinly courting this girl was to flee the country instead of telling the family that he was unaware of the ‘courtship’ or being honest about his interest with her.  I’m dead serious.  Within five minutes, he was planning on moving to New Zealand to do an agricultural exchange program so he wouldn’t have to upset her… (I don’t think he realized that his sudden departure would have done just that.)

Then, all of a sudden he realized he couldn’t leave yet because he’d already paid his fee to go to sheep sheering school with them.  To say that the rest of us found this whole thing comical would be an understatement.  Anyone else would have stormed out of the house and threatened to never speak to us mean cousins who were laughing at him, but not Evan.  He just shoke his head and let it roll of his back.  Why do I love him so much? Do you really have to ask.

Even as a child one of my favorite places to visit was my aunt and uncle’s ranch in southeastern Montana.  There’s something about driving out into the middle of nowhere and then going fifteen more miles down a unkempt dirt road that reminds you we’re all still small in this big world.  Imagine living miles from your mailbox, neighbors, and a store to buy a loaf of bread.  How about not traveling to civilization for weeks in the winter and traveling to school by snowmobile when the roads were too covered to navigate a truck.  It’s a different world then the one I grew up in, and yet every few years I find myself craving a retreat to this corner of land.  I ache to shed the technology and responsibility of my everyday life and recenter who I am and what’s really important.  In the days since I stepped off that plane in Mesa and drove back up the mountain, I’ve longed to return to the ranch.

Spend a few hours with my mom’s family, and you’ll begin to truly understand where Zac and I get our obsessive need for music. My grandfather has led the singing at whatever church he’s been at for yours. My mom, aunt, and uncle play the piano and sing. All thirteen cousins sing and/or play an instrument, and each of us has a unique, musical style. I guess calling our family “musical” would be a bit of an understatement.

One of the simplest joys in my Grandfather’s life has always been singing the ol’ hymns with his children and grandchildren. Whenever family is gathered, a group of us makes our way down to the basement piano to sing with “Grandbob” (as he’s been affectionately named) even if you aren’t a ’singer’. Despite our varied musical tastes, each of us have a love for those old hymns that we grew up singing in church and in that basement. To this day when I sing hymns in church, I hear his voice in the back of my head.

Like so many others, this trip was no different. With my Aunt Rena at the piano bench, Grandbob, Zac, Evan and I found time on two separate occasions to bond at the piano. Grandma made her way down the stairs to listen, and Grandbob was ecstatic. From “The Solid Rock” to “Shall We Gather At The River”, each of our voices blended together, and I struggled to not dissolve into tears at the uncertainty of how many more of these opportunities we’ll get with Grandbob. Upon my return home, I was delighted to discover in the middle of our musical moment another cousin had grabbed my camera and filmed a bit of it.

This week’s musical moment is a bit more personal than most. It’s a low-quality, poor-audio clip of one of the happiest moments in my life singing with my family and letting the music remind each of us of the blessing of music and the strong tie that binds us together.

Before I can really tell you about my trip, you have to allow me to gush about the gorgeous area I was in for most of my time away. The Black Hills of South Dakota have always been one of my favorite places to spend time, and with surroundings like these who wouldn’t want to get away there. At least once during every trip to see my grandparents in Spearfish, we drive through the canyon to a little cafe for the best breakfast north of Denver. Everyone at Cheyenne Crossing Cafe knows my grandparents by name and that warms my heart just a bit. Lucky for us, we had the time to really soak in the drive after breakfast and stop to enjoy the magnificent waterfalls found buried there. Zac and I had to hike a teeny, tiny bit to see this one, but it was so worth it. Especially when the group of foreign tourists came up to the creek right as Zac stepped into the arctic water with his feet clad in MY pink Crocs and howled. Good times…