The Tree, The Forest

70 70 F or months an innocuous blue envelope languished in the action box on my desk. A distant relative had sent a late Christmas card with a printed update (keeping busy with the Methodist church, the Lions Club, local Republican Party activities) and a handwritten note wishing me happy holidays. She closed with a simple request: “Please send us information so we can add your family to the tree.” Every few days I picked up that envelope and then dropped it back in the box, strangely paralyzed. The relative who sent the card—Cousin H, an nth cousin, nth removed—already knew my basic family structure, thanks to my parents’ own holiday missive earlier that season, which mentioned my partner, Ruthanna, and our son, Silas. I’ve been out for years to friends and close relations, but my parents’ dispatch spread the word farther and wider. I pictured it multiplying forty, sixty, eighty times over, fluttering into the mailboxes and onto the kitchen tables of distant cousins and Dad’s old Navy friends around the globe. For a brief spell, my nervousness about involuntary exposure played tug-of-war against my pride in Mom and Dad’s courage (for they had outed themselves too, as the parents of a lesbian). Then I moved on, giving myself over to gingerbread houses, paper snowflakes, cranberry strands—all the chaos and labor of making Christmas magical for a child. When the card from Cousin H arrived, I found myself once more tipped off balance. The Texas Republicans were including the lesbian branch of the tree. I was surprised, impressed, moved. Yet some part of me held back. The genealogy urge and the meaning of extended family have puzzled me for a long time. The family tree in question is associated with my paternal grandmother, the descendant of Swedes who settled in central Texas in the second half of the nineteenth century. Every handful of years, Cousin H, the unJUDITH ADKINS THE TREE, THE FOREST 71 Adkins 71 official family genealogist, coordinates a reunion for those of us in this line. We gather in a community center in some small Texas town, eat beef brisket, drink sweet tea, and mingle. Many of my relatives find common ground in football, but I don’t even know the rules of the game; others debate the particular merits of the barbecue, but I’m a vegetarian. The only other focal point of conversation is the vast family tree, hung mural-like above us. It’s little more than names—Carlsons, Swensons, Lundeliuses , and many others—plus birth dates, birthplaces, death dates. Our observations tend to be limited to “That poor Ingvar died young!” or “Whew! Hulda sure had the kids!” Every now and then someone pipes up with information about which ailment felled a particular relative, and I make a mental note in case this might someday facilitate self-diagnosis. For the most part, however , we gaze at the names silently, lingeringly, as if there should be something more to say about these people. Most are long dead and not forgotten, exactly, but not known either. A confusing haze of melancholy, or maybe loneliness, settles over me, and I wonder what connection, really, I have to any of them: the dead on the chart, and also the living relations eating smoked meat and drawling out stories about our nth cousin, once an nfl quarterback (Houston Oilers, I think, but don’t quote me). I’ve never been to Sweden. I’ve barely lived in Texas. For a long time I went to the reunions only because it was expected of me. Later I showed up specifically to counter my parents’ interpretation , or perhaps worry, when I first came out to them: that I was rejecting the family. I made a concerted effort then to show that I was still a loving, perhaps lovable, daughter. (A better one than ever! Overcompensation: a venerable queer tradition.) Nevertheless, at extended family gatherings I always thought that if my relations really knew me they would not claim me. I smiled up a force field, talked about my cat, and claimed more than once to be single when I was not...