Just the Five of Us: The Shape of a Family

On Friday night, from all different directions, we descended on Anna and Ronnie's house. I drove up from midtown after spending the day in the ATL office; Justin trekked from Buckhead. Dad made his way down from the northwestern part of the state. And around 9 o'clock on Friday evening, an anomaly occurred - as cosmically rare as the eclipse or comet tracks in the night sky. It was just the five of us.

Since Anna and Ronnie and Justin and Eva married in the same summer just a month apart six and a half years ago, I don't think we've had a single incident of pentagonal-ness.

Once upon a time, there were only five. Mom and Dad, of course. And then Anna, the oldest, Justin the middle, and me, the caboose. For the longest time, that was the way it was. With designated rooms and places at the table and roles in the family dynamic. We were inseparable -and I grant you, sometimes suffocatingly so - but even still, we were the Smash Family Five. And I treasured those times on family vacations, at the dinner table, in the backyard, when the laughter was riotous, the tears shared and the milestones celebrated together.

But when they married, the fold grew to seven, and the pentagon opened its sides, and we rearranged ourselves into a heptagon. Seven-sided. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Wilmywood, and the opportunities to regroup grew fewer. And the sides of our shape were scattered. And when we came back together, the shape had changed.

For the whole weekend, though, the pentagon reassembled. Eva spent the week in North Carolina keeping her brother while her parents vacationed. And while the circumstances of Ronnie's absence were omnipresent and permeating, the inevitable faltering of every conversation into melancholy silence or even tears, there were golden moments like threads of hope that reminded me how much I love these people. How strong the bonds of blood, so indestructible against the storms outside.

There's a reason that the most impenetrable fortress in this country is the Pentagon. With five sides, nothing can take us down.