Memorial Day Weekend, 2025
I’ve just spent a few (or many) minutes soaking up the sun’s rays with my feet in a still-ice-cold pool. I’m at my grandmother’s old home. A place where, as a kid, I spent summer days darting around the pool, trying to somehow outrun the burning concrete and outswim the sting of chlorine.
The house remains in the family, though it’s been renovated and now serves as a rental property. The pool slide is gone. The once-wild (yet beautiful) landscaping has been trimmed and tamed.
But this weekend, the house is ours again, reserved for visiting relatives here for the second Hernandez family reunion. While most of my immediate family lives in the Kansas City area, we now have relatives scattered across the country, from Michigan to Texas to, more recently, Florida.
As I step back inside, voices boom from the family room. Stories fly — the good, the bad, the absurd — from the days when nuns would smack misbehaving kids, to the time great-grandpa accidentally drank buttermilk on Thanksgiving.
Afternoon turns to evening, and the house hums with loud (because that’s the Hernandez way), lighthearted chatter. Great-Uncle Victor and his wife, Barbara, sit beside Great-Aunt Bea, all three beaming next to their brother — my nearly 86-year-old grandfather, Richard — happy to be together again.
My second cousin, Patrick, is in the kitchen, cooking beef tongue in a savory tomato sauce. My other second cousin, Renee, boils pasta for those of us who are less adventurous. Later, she scrolls through photos from her son Brandon’s wedding, pausing at the ones that make her laugh or tear up.
When I sneak upstairs for a quiet moment, I notice the photos that once lined the staircase are gone. No familiar faces on the walls or end tables. A wave of emotion hits.
But then I spot my grandmother’s artwork, still hanging proudly. Little touches from her home country remain, scattered throughout the house. And there’s something undeniably special about everyone coalescing here, on this weekend — generations gathered in one place. People who rarely see each other falling into that familiar rhythm of catching up on the present while drifting into stories of the past.
The word “legacy” often carries a connotation of grandeur, as if it only belongs to those who’ve left an indelible, far-reaching mark on the world. And while that can be true, I think legacy lives with us regular folks, too, in the recipes passed down, family jokes that never die, the way someone folds a napkin or tells a story just so. It lives in the gatherings and in the small, sacred traditions that are passed down from one generation to the next. Beef tongue might even become one … unless Renee has anything to say about it.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to storytelling; it’s one way to make sure the little things aren’t lost. Legacy doesn’t have to be monumental. It just has to mean something to the people who carry it forward.
