To Jim Halter on his 67th.

Jim is my cousin. Today, he turned 67. He lives in Northern California. I would have posted his name on yesterday's family birthday list, but I wasn't sure of the exact date. Now, I know. So, one more happy birthday is extended to Jim.

Last spring my three brothers and I accompanied our mother on a very special, nostalgic trip to the Trinity River Valley in Northern California where she attended first grade briefly. As mentioned in an earlier blog, her Aunt Anna Douglas from Michigan thought that wilderness was no place for a couple of little girls to grow up with their widower father.

So, she had her chauffeur drive her to California, pick up Mother and her sister June, and head on to San Antonio where Mother would begin the rest of her educational career attending Catholic boarding schools. Mother's dad, Frank Halter, was an artist and a gold prospector. He died of a massive heart attack when Mother was 15 and was buried in Oroville, California.

After we visited the area where Mother attended school in Burnt Ranch, we moved on to Oroville where we met Jim Halter and his wife Tommi. Frank Halter was Jim's grandfather. That means Jim is Mother's nephew and our first cousin.

Our initial duty after connecting with each other on that sunny, breezy May day near a Catholic school in Oroville was to find the cemetery and locate Frank Halter's grave. Since he was buried there in the mid-1930s, our search proved challenging. Grass had covered the gravestone, and only after contacting the cemetery groundskeeper did we finally uncover the simple small stone where our grandfather's initials provided the only clue to who was buried beneath.

That was enough, however. Since childhood, our 83-year-old Mother had long yearned to see her father and mother's graves. Unfortunately, her mother's grave from 1924 in the Hunt Cemetery off I-90 near Wallace is not to be found. We've been told it probably had a wooden marker, which has long since disappeared. She did, however, place flowers on her dad's resting place.

We also visited another cemetery in Oroville, where ironically, my dad's father is buried. Funny how two very different men from the Midwest (one a school teacher, the other an artist/prospector), having no reason ever to know each other and never knowing that their respective son and daughter would marry, ended up in the same town at the time of their deaths.

The visit to such tangible reminders of the past and to our common ancestry provided a great backdrop for getting to know our cousin Jim, whom most of us had met briefly a couple of times before. We spent the next three days just enjoying being family.

Tommi and Jim honored my mother for Mother's Day with an beautiful orchid and happily deemed her the "Queen Mum." We ate good food, shared family photos and exchanged a lot of good-natured banter during our visit.

The experience united two segments of the family who had not seen much each other. It also inspired us to make up for many lost decades of enjoying our common family bond.

And so today, Cousin Jim, you're added to the birthday string, and I send you my best wishes for a wonderful birthday.