In a few hours, I will drive my sister to the airport so she can fly back to Memphis where she lives.

It’s been a good visit and a rare one – like my other two sisters, Aunt Sharon only gets up here to northeast Ohio every few years. This time, she got to see snow. She got to cook the turkey, thank God. She got to meet international students from the local university who celebrated Thanksgiving with us.

Most importantly for me, as Maggi from askanaunt.org can attest, she got to spend time with my three children.

When my three sisters and I were growing up in Greenville, S.C., we were surrounded by extended family. We had two sets of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents, all living in the same town. We lived within a mile or two of 20 aunts and uncles, several great aunts and uncles, a great-great aunt here and there and dozens of cousins and first cousins, second cousins and cousins twice-removed.

Holidays were generous with relationship and family tradition: Thanksgiving was always at the home of Mama Syracuse, my maternal grandmother. We kids would put pillows on the floor in front of the TV in the living room, watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, while my mother and grandmother cooked. Later, like clockwork, we would watch the Packers against the Lions.

Easter was likewise predictable, held every year at the big Southern house of Grandma Bledsoe, my paternal grandmother. All us cousins would come in our Easter suits and big Easter dresses, puffed out with so many starched petticoats, and hide Easter eggs under the wrap-around porch. Afterwards, we would gather to wait and wait and wait for fried chicken and green beans and sweet tea while Uncle Bill said a blessing as long as the dining room table.

Christmas was at both grandparents, then ended at Big Mama’s, my great grandmother from Lebanon, where we played games with our mysterious dark-haired cousins home from college, then gobbled up grape leaves and homemade yogurt, meat pies and kibbeh and tabouli, and bowls and bowls of olives that were considered exotic because they were imported.

Extended family was a given during the events of my childhood, each event richer and more lovely than the next. But embedded deep in each moment was something even lovelier than the gifts of Christmas or the Easter pictures we would today post on PhotoWorks: We were, each of us, establishing place, identity and a sense of belonging.

And then my parents divorced. And my mother moved and took us with her. And that was that. This was the late 1960’s when people didn’t get divorced, certainly not good Southern Catholic girls. My mother was ashamed. Contact with all those family members dwindled to nothing as we eventually moved miles and cultures away from South Carolina, to New Orleans.

In the years that have passed, I have made attempts to reconnect. My father died in 1991, my mother in 2005. On my own, I have developed scattered e-mail relationships with a few extended family members – an uncle on my mother’s side, a remote cousin on my father’s.

But it is my three sisters that I cling to.

We live hundreds of miles apart. But we talk on the phone or e-mail every day. We know who among us has a doctor appointment, which sister gained 10 pounds, who among our six children got all As on their report cards. Even if we are not geographically close, we communicate daily the pains and joys of our lives. In the absence of the community of a large extended family, and perhaps in its memory, my sisters and I have learned to turn to each other for most everything we need. We look to each other to fill the gaps we know are there. And on that rare occasion when one of us comes to visit the other, we soak up the chance for our children to know the family they don’t even know they’re missing.

- Debra-Lynn