It’s summer and I’m welcoming dinner guests who have just moved to my Southern town so – of course! — I decide to make peach-blackberry cobbler. I once had a whole peach tree in the yard to pull the sweet gold from, but now I have to hit the Farmer’s Market and pay for them. Luckily I do own another key ingredient: a magical pink recipe card on which a friend’s mother, a native North Carolinian, once wrote down for me the best fruit cobbler recipe ever.

My problem is that I am a slipshod follower of recipes and a hopeless improviser.

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When the strawberries and sweet corn are ripe, charcoal grill smoke fills the air, and days seem lazier just because they’re longer, I think more often about a particular kind of relationship. It’s less analyzed than the one with your parents or your menfolk, more fragile than the bond with your sibs (who, love ‘em, hate ‘em — or both simultaneously – tend to boomerang back at you your entire life), and yet potentially more enduring than ties with even the best of friends, because with this relationship, there’s blood involved.

Summertime has me thinkin’ ‘bout cousin time.

Have you noticed how a little-discussed byproduct of scattered families is scattered cousins?

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