I suppose there are quite a few family farms that have operated without cousins, but for me it’s hard to imagine. Cousins seem to be as connected to farm life as shovels and weeds – always around and always in need of attention. When my dad was growing up, his city aunts and uncles shipped cousins down to the farm in the summers as a sort of a seasonal reform measure. I’m guessing they hoped farm life would instill a work ethic into their hellion offspring, or at least get them away from whatever exciting temptations were brewing in the city. I’m not sure anyone ever got reformed that way. It seems to me that everyone involved, city and country, just exchanged methods of going to heck in a handbasket.

Michele Coleman

Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of...

Of course, the great thing about cousins is: They provide the best of two worlds. They are friends, but at the same time, they are better than friends because they are also family. They come over on all the days when regular friends can’t – Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. Cousins are always present at funerals and weddings too, forced into uncomfortable clothing and church shoes right along with you. It’s bonding. And as a bonus, you can fight with them. When they are visiting, you can be your real and awful self. You can laugh when they face plant on the ice pond, you can rope them into doing your chores, and you can take the biggest piece of dessert guilt-free. It’s an etiquette fact that cousins require a lower form of guest manners than regular people do. In fact, the only difference between them and brothers and sisters is: You care a little bit about what they think of you, and they have toys you haven’t played with yet. Best of all, cousins can’t just up and not be your friend simply because you tell them they are lying, stinking cheats at Monopoly or because you light firecrackers underneath their chairs. They know and you know that when the next family reunion comes around, they will have to cycle back again. 

Cousins aren’t without their pitfalls, of course. It’s a universal truth that the oldest cousins are always the coolest of the cousins, but it’s also an unalterable fact they never want to play with you if they have a better offer on the table. They want to go ride horses with your oldest sister or talk with her in secret about things you “are too young to understand.”

The younger cousins, on the other hand, are always up for anything, but they are pesty and you don’t want to play with them unless no one else is available. That doesn’t mean younger cousins aren’t a force to be reckoned with. I’ll never forget the summer of the great cousin payback. For some reason, our parents had decided it was a great idea to have me and my sister help move handlines at my uncle’s farm while his oldest kids were at camp – never mind that I had never moved a handline in my life. My initiation and education were left in the hands of my younger cousins. Of course. They could run handlines like gazelles, and they’d shove pipe together faster than I could find my direction, twisting and clicking it into place like magicians. I’d lumber along behind like an old cow let loose in irrigation boots, making a mess wherever I went. The worst part of the whole humiliating week was that they were so patient with me. “I was not good at this either when I started at age 6.” “If you want, I can do three lines to your one.” “It’s really not your fault you don’t know what you’re doing.”

That experience highlights another problem with cousins: They don’t get you out of doing chores. My parents may have hesitated to send me out to weed the beans if a friend from school was over, but they thought a visiting cousin was their very own two-for-one special. Mom’s philosophy was that if she didn’t put us to good use, we’d be up to no good. She had the strangest preconceived notions.

Of course, cousins don’t even have to be present to affect your life. What they do or don’t do becomes part of a shared and compared family history, a reference book of sorts, for whatever you do with your life ever after. No matter what you accomplish, you can bet that somewhere in the line of first, second or cousins-once-removed, there will always be a relative who has done it better. I’ve had valedictorian cousins, never-talks-back-to their-mother cousins, whole-grain-eating cousins and cousins who read the Constitution for fun. As a group, they have been altogether too intelligent, talented, musical and good looking for my own good. On the other hand, I’ve also had cousins who tried their best to send their parents to an early grave, so there’s comfort in that.

All in all, farm life just wouldn’t be as rich without the cousins of every generation. My kids now have their own posse of first and second cousins running around the place raising Cain. I guess everyone needs a sidekick in order to fully explore the potential of gravity, water and explosives. Mysteriously, cousins can talk you into life-changing experiences like no one else can, assuring you that you’ll survive a parachute-worthy jump from the haystack, that your mom will never find out who stole the cookies, and that your dad really wants you to learn how to use the power tools. They call you chicken at the exact right moment before you can back out of some great but poorly planned enterprise.

Most importantly, they are a partner in crime that, no matter the consequences, your parents can’t separate you from forever. After all, you’re related.