My "Balentine"

I am an American living in Sweden. Ironically, I have a cousin married to a Dane living in Denmnark. My husband, who grew up in Sweden, was actually born in Denmark, and as it turns out my father-in-law lives only about 20 miles from my cousin.

Being a blood relative is something else. My cousin Eddie is 10 years my senior, and I only visited his family on one occasion growing up, when I was five and he was fifteen. It was in February, around Valentine's Day, and despite my young age, I was enchanted by his smile, good looks, and charisma. I decided he was my "Balentine".

As the years passed the only other times we met were at my grandparents' funerals. At this point I was a teenager, and Eddie was "grown up", but he was still as charming as I had remembered, and he had all of us, my siblings and other cousins included, in stitches laughing, despite the gravity of these social occasions.

Now that we are the only "family" we have this side of the Atlantic, we try to get together about once a year. His daughter is three years older than my daughter while our sons are born only two weeks apart. He recently opened a small brewery in Denmark that is starting to really take off, one of the reasons being that he has the Danes under the same charming spell as the rest of us.

When we sit down to eat, we swap stories from our childhood, amazed at the similarities between our families even though we so rarely met. We reminisce about our grandparents, the house they owned in Philadelphia, complete with my grandfather's spooky funeral parlor that was on the ground floor, and jovially laugh recalling how scared we were passing through there on trips from the upstairs apartment to the basement.

Even though I never got to know Eddie then, our common ground connects us, and the joy I experience meeting him is so pure, just as the love I feel knowing we share a bond like no other. Fate has played a big part in our destinies which has entailed us leaving our home country in order to build new homes in Scandinavia, with new cultures and languages to boot. A change as huge as this really challenges your sense of identity and belonging (as well as longing), but when Eddie and I get together, I can be MYSELF, and I like that.