Sorry I missed it. According to Baby Sister on the phone, there was a real homemade ice cream-eating get-together up at Uncle Kent’s old place.

My Miami cousins, Nell and Virginia Dale, got the old house when they divided the property, and they split their time between Miami and Frontier Country. Baby Sis says there were some good old family tales told, just as anytime when two or more Sanderses get together.

Jeweline, Aunt Myra’s second daughter, is the heiress-apparent to be the matriarch of the clan, the oldest one after Mother. She is also the repository for many stories, some funny, some not.

She remembers something I never heard Daddy mention, something really hurtfully sad. I had always known that Daddy dropped out of school somewhere around the eighth grade, because he was needed on the farm, I supposed. But he told Jeweline in one of their long talks not long before he died, that Grandpa pulled him out of the public school because they started teaching “Science.”

Then it kind of fell into place: Looking back, that would have coincided with the time when the theory of evolution, Darwinism, entered the system, as headlined by the Scopes trial; and Grandpa and Grandma, being the rigid Puritan inerrantists that they were, wouldn’t have wanted their son exposed to that kind of stuff. So they yanked him out. Grandma did some “home schooling,” but he essentially had an eighth grade education. Not to belittle that: I’ve seen a list of things Kansas eighth-graders were supposed to know back then, and I don’t know any Ph.D.s who could pass that test. But, so very, very sad.

She also told of other things, like the time, many years ago, when she stopped by Aunt Lessie’s. Aunt Lessie had just baked a bunch of sweet potatoes.

“Why, sit down,” Aunt Lessie said, rocking in front of the fireplace. “I’ve got some baked sweet potatoes back there in the kitchen. Have one and sit a spell.”

“Can’t,” Jeweline said. “Gotta meet somebody.”

“Well, take one along, anyway,” Aunt Lessie said.

“OK,” said Jeweline. So she grabbed a nice warm baked potato, put it on the front passenger seat, and took off.

Up around Sandy Hollow, she decided to have a taste. She glanced over at the passenger seat and the potato was gone.

So she pulled over to the side of the road and started reaching over to the far side of the car, thinking the potato had dropped off that side of the seat. As she was stretched out, prone, feeling around, trying to make contact with the potato, a pickup pulled alongside and a nice gentleman asked if she needed any help.

From her very awkward position, she looked up and said, “No, thank you, I’ve lost my potato.”

The man, completely dead-pan, turned to his wife and said, “She’s lost her potato,” and drove off.

Wynell, Charlie, Gay, Guynell, Tom, Peggy, Ferrell, Banks, Dan, Linda ... a bunch of cousins. And they went through four freezers of ice cream.

Sissies. Five if I’d been there.