We were fortunate enough to be able to host our "every-third-year" family reunion here on Saturday. Since we live on the "home place", we always have it here. As I have been thinking of family relationships, I received this "Chicken Soup for the Soul" last week.

Too many times nowadays with the media and modern medical discoveries, we sometimes feel badly if we inherit or pass along "less than the best" genetics........physical qualities, predispositions to some diseases, and the rest. Maybe instead we need to celebrate all the "good" stuff we got from our ancestors and are passing along to future generations:

A Gift through the Generations
By Harriet Cooper

My grandmother was of average height, had hazel eyes and salt and pepper hair that framed a round face. She had lots of laugh lines and a smile that said she had plenty of love to give. When you hugged her, there was plenty to hang onto. I know because I hugged her a lot.

She wasn't beautiful by today's definition. She didn't turn heads when she walked into a room. If you saw her on the street, you would probably have walked by her without a second glance. There are millions of overweight grandmothers in the world - mine would have blended right in.

But if you did walk by her, if you didn't notice her, you would have been missing someone special.

When I was growing up, going over to my grandmother's was always a special occasion. Although there was little money for new furniture or fancy knickknacks, the house was filled with food and love, in equal amounts. Even now when I think of her, more than 30 years after her death, I find it hard to separate my memories of her from the food she made.

Mostly, I remember her baking. The kitchen table would be covered with flour and she would be up to her arms in dough, her short, nimble fingers able to turn the most mundane ingredients into light, flaky treats from the old country. While my contribution to the baking was often no more than carrying ingredients from the fridge to the table, I took my role as her assistant very seriously.

I don't think I ever felt as close to her as I did then, when it was just the two of us in the kitchen. The older grandchildren would be out shopping or at the movies, too old or too sophisticated to want to spend time with a grandmother who wasn't up on the latest fashion or the music group.

Not me. I was exactly where I wanted to be - in a cramped kitchen helping my grandmother. While she measured and kneaded, whipped and stirred, she talked to me. Not about the big world out there, but about the little world in which we lived. The day-to-day stuff - school, food, and family.

Mostly what she did was to make me feel loved and wanted. In that kitchen, while I was with her, I was the most important person in her life.

I didn't inherit my grandmother's culinary talents but I did inherit her eyes, her sense of humor and, unfortunately, her body build. For the longest time, I saw that as a curse. Instead of being tall and slender, I was short and dumpy. More peasant stock than royalty.

I blamed my excess padding on both my grandmother and my mother. They were the ones who gave me one hip that's a good inch lower than the other one. Hips that in the old country would be considered good childbearing hips, but which in this country are too wide.

During my teens and into my twenties, every time I looked in the mirror I saw only my defects. I was too short, too round-faced, too wide in the hips, too this and too that. There was nothing about my body that I liked. It was all their fault.

Now, when I look back, I can see how much time and energy I wasted blaming them for passing on their less than perfect physical traits. Because I was so focused on what I saw as negative traits, I forgot the thing that mattered most - their real beauty.

I would look at the last picture ever taken of my grandmother and would feel how much I missed her. But I was missing more than her. I was missing my heritage. Luckily, as I got older, and maybe a little bit wiser, I began to understand and to reach out for it.

My mother is now older than my grandmother was when she died. Over the years, my mother has begun to look more and more like my grandmother. Her hair is starting to go salt and pepper and she has begun to put on a little more weight around the middle. There are also more lines on her face than there used to be.

The family resemblance is becoming stronger and stronger with each passing year.

In watching my mother grow more like my grandmother, I am rediscovering just how beautiful my grandmother was and how beautiful my mother is. And in rediscovering their beauty, I am also discovering mine. No, not the textbook definition of beauty, but my own definition. One that is right for me.

I no longer complain quite as much when my mother visits and brings me boxes of food. I now understand that like her mother before her, my mother sees food as love. While she doesn't bake quite as well as my grandmother did, no one ever will, my mother bakes love into everything she makes.

As I get older, the family resemblance is coming out more and more in me too. The hazel eyes, the laugh lines, the hair with the first gray ones appearing and yes, the figure with the full hips and expanding middle. Only now I don't see them as a curse, but as a blessing.

All of these things form a bond between me, my mother, my grandmother and all their mothers who came before them. I only have to look in the mirror to see that I belong to a long line of very special women.

Of course, I expect to get more and more beautiful as I get older with each laugh line and each gray hair tying me more closely to those who have come before me.