Cousins, the bonus siblings

I’ve heard cousins described as a child’s first set of friends. They’re not exactly family, but they’re close, and you see them often enough that they understand the weird things that make your family click. You feel like you’re born knowing them.

Our Hutton cousins were closer than that.

Eleanor Ergood was born eight years after her sister Julia. Julia went on to have two daughters and two sons, while Ellie went on to have four sons of her own. The four of us and the four of them were close enough in age that when we visited our grandmother together, as we often did, we automatically would close ranks together. It was us versus them, and we knew it.

On those visits we got up to the shenanigans you might expect a tribe of siblings to get up to. We camped in a tent in our grandparents’ yard. We played with the Lincoln Logs and Cooties and Monopoly set that were Grandma’s sole accommodation to having grandchildren around, and when we got bored with having giant insects attack the log cabins on Park Place, we would walk the mile or two to the park in nearby Ardmore.

It was Grace who told me to pee against a tree when we were at the park and no bathroom was available; and it was Susan who joined us for a nighttime game of hide-and-seek one October, when my brother Blair convinced us we should hide behind a bush three blocks away. We all got lost, and didn’t make it back to Grandma’s house for two hours, by which point my grandmother was getting ready to call 9-1-1, my parents were just relieved we’d made it back safe and sound, and Susan’s parents decided it was time for a Very Serious Talk.

(“Oh god, not another very serious talk.” Susan said. I was only 8 years old, but I still caught the existential despair in her voice.)

They’re not just cousins, they’re auxiliary siblings, and it may be that our parents had an arrangement to skim some of us like cream off the top when there were too many of us..

When my mother wanted to buy my cousin Susan a dress, it was me she publicly humiliated at the mall by forcing the dress over my head while my brothers jeered, to see if it would fit.

That was 45 years ago, and my soul still shrivels inside me when I think of it. Like a true sister, Susan brings it up every time we see each other, even as we laid my mother to rest earlier this month.

There was no denying the special place my cousins held in my mother’s heart. Once, when my cousin Ned came to visit, word got around the street that he was my mother’s son from her first marriage. Other times, when the four of us got too rowdy and “pass me a roll” became an invitation at the dinner table to play a round of football with a scrimmage line, ball in play and rules of tackle on the table, we would find mom afterward in the family room, holding a picture of her Hutton nephews and nieces and speaking wistfully of the children she’d never had.

Everyone agrees, cousins are special, and as far as I’m concerned my Hutton cousins have been the gold standard for what it means to be cousins and grow up together.

I’m still amazed we all survived the experience.