venta

But she's got someone else and they're starting a family, trying for a clan of their own...

My mother's family is rather similar. There were something like nine children in my grandmother's generation (more or less, with the usual secret family shames) so I used to have a passel o' great-aunts. But the extended family have drifted apart. My Auntie Belle was the only one who kept track of the branches, and she died years ago.

Then again, family's never mattered to me much, what with having grown up hundreds of miles from most of it, and only seeing cousins and grandparents and suchlike once a year. And I don't really feel the poorer for it.