When I married Dave 31 years ago, I inherited a unique extended family. In my own family there were cousins I barely knew and uncles you didn’t talk about without upsetting everyone. Not so with the Ehman clan. The Ehmans gathered annually to sit around a table covered with a lace tablecloth and piled high with sugar cookies and Kuchen. Coffee drinking was the main event of the day. Except for when they went to the mall where instead of shopping, they plopped down at a coffee shop to keep visiting. They didn’t all agree on politics or religion or social issues, but they savored simply being together and sharing their lives with each other. There was safety at that table drinking coffee.

There were moments when I assumed that sweet affection would fade. The kids and grandkids all grew up and moved around the nation from Portland to New York, from the Philippines to Europe. Gathering would prove challenging as the kids married and had their own kids. But miraculously, the gatherings kept going. Then my parents-in-law, Jacob and Helen passed away and that could have been another moment to cease gathering. But someone put on another pot of coffee, and we kept weaving our lives together at family weddings, graduations, promotions, reunions, and vacations.

The oldest nephew, Jered, was 16 when I met him. Sweet and ordinary. A good kid with no big ambitions. He married Diana whom we fell in love with too. They have two sons in college now. Jered is a three-star General in the Army but to us, he’s just Jered. So over Labor Day Jered and his family came to visit us for the weekend and we hosted other local relatives for a dinner of 16. It was nothing special really. And yet it was everything. There was coffee. A walk. Church. A nap. And after dinner, two of my mother-in-law’s famous apple pies. As I looked at the pies before I cut them, I felt my mother-in-law’s presence. I knew she was there. I felt her sweetness.

Family is a gift. Whether it’s the one you were born into, the one you married into or the one you created out of love instead of blood. We all need that safe zone where we are welcomed at the table. There we taste life’s ordinary sweetness. The author James McBride says that “love is the greatest novel ever written.” Wherever you experience that novel’s pages unfolding, that is family.

Grace and Peace,
Carla