The good lands are any where the family is. I was in the badlands, walked among the dinosaurs, under the sentinel hoodoos. I was in nature and the birds flew over me; I got into a very long and impassioned discussion with a seagull
As you all know, English is a language so deficient in terms of kinship that it is as if it has been strip-mined by capitalism. What do you call the former spouse with whom you occasionally travel and are fraternal with? What do you call former and longstanding inlaws, when you were never married to one of their siblings but had kids, mortgage, all that stuff? What do you call a longstanding family friend whose friendship and love demonstrated over time came to be part of the structure of your family? What do you call the relatives you stay in touch with after a really bad breakup? How do you twist English, which despite its size is short on nuance, into words to which take the experiences of relationship and bind them into something useful and contemporary without being twee or clinical? How many of us have relationships which somehow aren’t important enough to have a word assigned to them and yet are everywhere once you start looking?
I call people who belong to my church my churchsiblings or churchsibs for short; we have us and our trust and our time and our food and our travails and our finances and our deaths and births and miraculous recoveries and dreadful runs of luck and kids who make the world finals and play in Junior A in common; we follow illness, divorce and mature student MAs and wonderful, hilarious children’s pageants with a wonderful sense of being in a large, complex and engrossing dance, which moves along in perfect time with all that is and yet is a very special subset of that Big Dance of which one can imperfectly say, That’s All Folks.
I’m thinking of the word breadrellies. Can you tell what kind of relatives those would be?