The Free Reunion at the Lake
The Holm reunion started in 1958, the summer after my great-grandfather died. His six children decided that the family would not drift apart just because the farm was sold, so they rented the shelter at the county park on Pine Lake and brought everything they owned in a covered dish.
That is the reunion I grew up with. My grandmother’s ham balls in the brown crock. Aunt Edna’s rhubarb bars, cut in exact two-inch squares with a ruler. Somebody’s cooler of Grain Belt hidden behind the outhouse so the Lutherans would not see it.
There was always a softball game on the lumpy field by the boat landing, always a cousin who fell off the dock in his church clothes, always a family photo at the end with somebody’s uncle running to get into the frame before the timer went off.
Nobody organized it, exactly. One of the older aunts would call around in April, and somebody would drive out and reserve the shelter, and everybody brought a dish. If you didn’t have a dish you brought a bag of chips and nobody said a thing.
When the last of the older aunts got too old to call around, my cousin Tracy took it over. That was eight years ago. Tracy is three years older than me. Her mother and my mother were sisters, and we spent our summers as girls jumping off that same dock and hiding from the same mean goose.
I was grateful when Tracy took it over. I want that on the record. Somebody had to make the calls, and it was not going to be me, with two little boys and a job and a husband working overtime at the feed mill.
For five years it ran the old way. Then, three years ago, the post came out with the fee.
Seventy-five dollars a head, for the pavilion and the food. The family group was quiet for a day, and then people started paying, because that is what you do. Tracy had done the work. It seemed ungrateful to ask what the money was for.
That first year, I walked into the pavilion with my check already cashed, and I found two folding tables with a dozen tubs of fried chicken from the grocery store deli, still sweating in their plastic. Two bags of dinner rolls. A sheet cake with the price sticker still on the clear lid.
There were a few dishes people had brought anyway, out of habit. Somebody’s potato salad. Somebody’s bars. Those went first. The chicken sat in the sun, and by three o’clock the flies had found it.
I did the math in my head that day without meaning to. I am a dental office manager. I do math about other people’s money all day long. And the math did not look right to me.
But I didn’t say anything. Nobody did. Tracy had a hard look on her face all that afternoon, and she left early, and I told myself it was none of my business how she ran a picnic.
The second year was the same. The chicken was from a different store. The cake didn’t have a sticker. About forty adults paid, and the kids ran around the field, and a few of the old faces were missing, and nobody said why.
My mother paid both years, for herself. Edna did not come either year. She said her hip, and then she said she was tired, and the second year she just said she didn’t feel like it, which was not a thing I had ever heard Edna Holm say about anything.