December 9th, 2015: Finding Lost Family

     When my mother's father (my grandfather) died, I lost touch with my aunt Gayle and her family. That was somewhere around 1981, so it has been a very long time. I got some misinformation that they had moved to Tennessee with my great uncle Bobby Johnson, so I tried to look there for them. Several years ago, I found my uncle and learned that he was still living in the same area that he was years ago.
     He did not know where my aunt was, but gave me an area that he thought they might be in. Using the Internet, I have been searching for them for the past several years. When I was down in Houston last October, I was going to go check out some leads that I had found, but when I looked closer, I realized that they were old addresses with no forwarding information. The phone numbers were disconnected, and some other family was living where my aunt had been just a couple of years earlier. On the day that I was packing up to go back home, I stumbled upon an address for my aunt's youngest son, Sean. I flew home and when I unpacked, that address got put aside and forgotten until a couple of weeks ago.
     I came across it in a pile of things that I had gathered to file. I sat down and wrote a letter to my cousin Sean explaining who I was and how I was related to him. I gave him every contact number, email address, and home address that I have in the hopes that he or someone else in the family would contact me.
     Last night, 12-8-2015, my cousin Debbie called me on the phone. Sean had gotten my letter and called Debbie and Gayle. It is probably one of the best Christmas presents I could get this year to reconnect with my favorite aunt again. When I started writing as an early teen, my Aunt Gayle read the stories that I wrote and gave me a lot of positive feedback and encouragement. It was because of her that I continued to write stories and poetry. Here I am fifty years later still writing and loving what I get to do.
     Although I called my aunt, she did not answer, so I had to leave a message. Hopefully, I will hear from her in the next couple of days...