We just got through refinancing our house last week, which will reduce our mortgage payment by a much-needed hundred and twenty dollars a month, reduce the interest rate by a percent and a half (6¼ from 7¾), and let us pay it off in twenty more years instead of twenty-two. I’d been wanting to refinance for some time, but feared that our credit rating was too poor to let us even try, so I dismissed it from my mind. Then about a month ago we got a FedEx letter from JP Morgan Chase, our mortgage holder, out of a clear sky. When I first picked it up, I was afraid it was some kind of bad news—a call on the mortgage, a deficiency we needed to make up—but it turned out to be a letter inviting us to refinance. We took them up on it.
Our mortgage banker sent us her business card with one packet of documents, and in passing I noticed she was based in Summerville, South Carolina. That name meant something to me. My great-grandfather W— grew up in Summerville, and that was where he’d started from when he came to Texas. The next time I phoned the banker, I mentioned that I had a connection to Summerville and explained what it was. She replied, “Well, I couldn’t bring it up myself, but I wondered about that because I’m a W— too.” The coincidence of name was why she’d picked us off a list of possible refinance candidates. We haven’t worked it out completely, but at the moment it looks like we’re third cousins, sharing a common great-great-grandfather. Cousin Sue said that the W—s still pretty much run Summerville (boy, ain’t that true; when I googled it, I found the mayor pro tem, one of the city councilmen, and the fire chief are all W—s, which ain’t counting whoever might have married in), and many of the family are in forestry one way or another. The family still has what Sue refers to as a “compound,” where a whole raft of them live. They have a reunion every Easter weekend, and she’s recruiting us to come over for it, next year or so.
And on the other end of things, L’s mother called to say that L’s grandmother (her father’s mother), who is 93, has told her doctor she wants to stop getting the blood transfusions she’s had for several years to combat a persistent anemia. In effect, that’s the same as announcing she’s ready to die. L’s going to fly up there next week with M for a few days’ visit, because it’s almost certainly the last time any of us are likely to see Tink alive. I can’t take time off to go, and T doesn’t want to; she isn’t that fond of any of L’s family for various reasons.
Gertrude Stein invested a rubber window sash in the Peloponnesian War. Fnord.
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