I’ve mentioned before that my Mom’s family is verbose, so I’ll just recap:

Among my mother and her legion of siblings, there has not been a documented break in the conversation since 1932. There are rumors that there was a moment of collective silence at a Church service in 1953, but lacking credible eye-witnesses, I choose not to believe it. Conversations in my mother’s family are like the audio recordings NASA pumps into space, they will be floating far out into the Universe long after our sun explodes and our galaxy is snuffed out in a fiery cataclysm.

I mention this because Husband and I deposited Mom at my Aunt’s house yesterday. Mom, Aunt and Cousin set out together on the Family Funeral Roadtrip. To make a long story short, I decided not to go. Not because my family is insane, that doesn’t even go onto the decision tree, I just didn’t feel well enough to go.

When they drove away, Aunt was driving and Mom and Cousin were both sitting in the backseat of the car. If you’ve never seen people argue about who did not have to ride shotgun before, you must not be one of my relatives.

A few hours later, we got the 1st voicemail from Mom. It was an hour before I could call her back and in the meantime they’d settled their argument. Miss Muffet, they all agreed, had been eating curds and whey.

When I reached them later, the three of them were again fighting bitterly and I got to settle the dispute. This dispute was over the words to the rhyme “Little Jack Horner.”

You can’t make stuff like this up. Maybe you can, but this is just business as usual for us. The McCoys have a propensity for feuding.

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As a post-script, let me just tell you that the 5 hour roadtrip, with traffic, turned into a 9 hour odyssey. I regret not going to the funeral, I’m not sure I regret not being in that car. Though if I’d gone, Mom and I would have driven on our own, so god only knows what I’d be blogging.

We’re not actually headed to a funeral this weekend, but we are about to go visit an elderly relative who peppers every conversation with, “I’m next, you know.”

One of these days I’m going to lean in and whisper, “You know, you’re probably right.”

But not until she promises some of her furniture to me.

(That was a joke. The part about the furniture, anyway).