Apologies for the long absence.  Tough times for me personally and up here in Big Northeastern City.  April is a cruel month.  I’ll post more about that later.

Last night, I got a call from a number I don’t know.  I recognized the area code as one from the woodsier part of Northeastern State but not the number.  Eh, that’s what voicemail’s for, I thought and let it go.

And then I got a text.  It was from one of my cousins and she mentioned that my mother (boo, hiss) had said she should call me about some medical stuff.  I had two sets of cousins for most of my childhood.  I say “most” because my mother was adopted and found her birthmother and a whole set of half sisters with kids when I was in my early teens.  So that opened up another bunch of cousins.  All boys, which was funny since the two sets I’d had up til then had been all girls.  Three girls who were my dad’s brother’s kids (although my dad came from a pretty large family, all my dad’s sisters had endometriosis back when that meant unaddressable infertility) and three girls who were my mother’s brother’s kids.  My mother and her brother were both adopted.  Remember that, it’s important.

The one who reached out to me was my uncle’s second child.  Another middle kid.  I have the following associations with her:

• She was always very pretty, in a fairy-like way.  Gorgeous long blond hair on top of the delicate features she and her sister shared.  
• Young.  Always so young.  All of our cousins were younger than my little brother, which meant that the eldest of the cousin sets was still my junior by some years.  The consequences of this are that although I felt an affinity for the middle daughters in both sets, there was a bit of a divide since in childhood social spheres, age does make a difference in peer relation. 
• Peppy.  Not crazed with energy, but peppy.  
• Easily injured.  It didn’t keep her down, but she did fall a lot.  

Seeing her text, I immediately called her back.  yeah, it was late and yeah I’m gonna pay for that today but I had been thinking of her and her family so much over the last few months.  I think it started around christmas time and has just been picking up steam.  Not a week has gone by where I don’t think of them.  We weren’t super close.  My parents were just kind of isolated and aloof so this meant we didn’t get really close with any extended family.  So I’m not sure why this branch of my tiny family tree was on my mind so much but it was.  And when I saw her text, I thought “ok if this doesn’t mean we need to connect, I don’t know what does.”  The first thing she said was that I sounded exactly the same.  It’s been almost 20 years since I last saw her, and that was at my first wedding.  I’d be surprised if I said more than a paragraph to her during that since I was stressed and running pillar to post and she was sick and down for the count some.

The next thing she said was “so I hear you’re a zebra too.”

What is up?  Health wise, I asked.  Turns out that my cousin has very likely got EDS, definitely has POTS, heavy on the “T”.  And endometriosis.  The list goes on but I don’t want to put all of her health info up here like it’s mine.  This is an anonymous blog but still, not my right.  Suffice it to say, we have a hell of a lot of overlap in clinical presentation.  Although she’s cold intolerant

I was staggered.  At one point, she said “I feel like I’m talking to myself.”  And I knew exactly what she meant.  “Are you sure weren’t not related by blood?”  Pretty sure.  But boy that is some strangeness.  “WTF was in the water?  Doesn’t it make you wonder if there was something in our environment?” I asked.  But it’s not like we spent a ton of time together or at each other’s houses.  We lived rather far apart too.  We were on city water, she was probably on well water given the rather rural town where her family lived.