In a nod to an old Sister Sledge song, "We Are Family," my daughters and their girl cousins have always addressed each other affectionately as "Sledgie." My kids and most of their cousins grew up in the same town. They have always been as close as brothers and sisters. Even as adults they spend more time with each other than they do with many of their friends, and are best friends as well as relatives.

In this respect, I envy the close bonds my kids share with their cousins. My own cousins live thousands of miles away. Even though we don't get to see each other often the bond is still there and when we do get together, it's as if no time has separated us.

My cousins are great pranksters, but I like to think that my brother and sisters can give as good as we get. Several years ago when my cousin Malinda had just started a job as a club manager at an exclusive country club, my sisters and I flew out to California to visit our relatives. We decided to visit Malinda at work as soon as we got there.

So with Malinda's older sister leading the way, we stopped at a thrift store and got a trunk full of the best "bag lady" outfits we could find. Malinda was a good sport when we showed up at her country club looking like derelicts. She had the good grace to smile through her promise of revenge. We weren't worried.

A few years later we all went to California again for another cousin's wedding. Malinda had some idea for a wedding decoration that sounded more like something you'd find on a homecoming float. I don't remember exactly what it was she had in mind, but we were given the task, the night before, of assembling something that involved chicken wire and Kleenex that spelled out the name of the bride and groom.

My sisters and I worked on it for a few minutes before we decided that we really needed to send Malinda a message about our opinion of this idea. The message involved putting the chicken wire contraption outside our aunt's hotel room and setting it on fire.

Many years passed, my oldest daughter grew up and got engaged. All my California cousins came to Illinois for the big event. Those people have long memories. We came home from the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding to find the house mummified in toilet paper.

I wasn't amused. I was too busy to deal with this mess the night before a wedding and while I was loudly complaining about the mess, my aunt asked me, "Would you have done the same thing to them?" Well that shut me up.

The next day at the wedding, the cousins were all relatively well behaved, until we walked into the reception. Every one of them was sporting hideously garish feather boas. No bird I've every seen grew any feathers like those. And those feathers drifted around the room all night, and, we later heard from the country club staff, it was several days before all the feathers were retrieved.

The years have flown by. Many of us cousins are grandparents now. My cousin Malinda became a successful businesswoman and community leader. But a few years ago she suffered a terrible tragedy. She was boating one afternoon with a group of friends when a drunken boater crashed into her boat.

Malinda was terribly injured and the 9-year-old daughter of one of the guests, who was sitting on Malinda's lap, was killed. Malinda had a long arduous recovery. But in the months ahead, she and the single father of the young girl, united in grief, fell in love.

A few months ago I received a video from my aunt. It seemed to be a video of my cousin receiving a community award and the presenter of the award was her new boyfriend. But suddenly he turned to her in the midst of the presentation, knelt down, and proposed marriage to her. That's how I found out my cousin was getting married.

Cousins are a wonderful blessing. They share all your sorrows and delight in all your joys. They are friends who know you because they are a part of you and you are bound to them by the ties of family. We cousins are happy for Malinda and hope her hard times are behind her.

If we could just figure out what we're wearing to the wedding!