For the occasion, I bought a new swimsuit, a retail exercise that elicited equal parts anxiety and anticipation. Nonetheless, the skirted suit with the matching cover-up set the tone for the family reunion. I wanted to look my best for the people I've known longest.

At home, the yard was coiffed, the clutter stuffed into closets. Children were ordered to clean their rooms or else! and the husband was cajoled to finish a honey-do list. Before the invasion of cousins and aunts and uncles and assorted in-laws, the house gleamed in glorious, albeit short-lived, splendor.

For the first time ever, practically everybody I was related to converged at the same time in the same place for the same happy event. In this time and age, with responsibilities stretching us thin, this is no small feat. The last time we all came together was for an event I'd rather forget, one that can still elicit a sharp pang of bitter regret: the funeral of my sister and brother-in-law.

Not this year. We were due a celebration. And celebrate we did. We salsaed at my father's surprise 80th birthday, waded into the waters of the warm Atlantic and consumed so many calories over so many days that, in the end, we all parted ways with the same caloric-restriction intentions.

Though the family tree first grew in the European Pyrenees, over the years its branches and twigs have been scattered by the unforeseen forces of war and exile and economics. So relatives came from as far away as Holland and Spain. They flew in from Chicago and California and Virginia and drove across town from Miami Beach and West Dade. Pressed together for several days, I realized that, despite the thinning ties of blood and the separation of miles and oceans, we are all still bound by one shared trait: We argue about everything, politics primarily.

Summer is the traditional season for family reunions. Visit a theme park and likely you will run into groups wearing telltale T-shirts. Spend a weekend at the beach and you'll see the same nose -- or the same eyes or walk or laugh -- displayed across the generations. We are driven, it seems to me, by a need to belong, to connect, to weave the thread of the past into the fabric of the future. I have never felt a greater sense of immortality -- and mortality, of course -- than when I watched my twin granddaughters toddle through the legs of their great-grandfather.

Will they remember these reunions? At what age will they discover that the ties that bind can wither if not nurtured? As grandparents themselves, will they host gatherings that provide this same bittersweet sense of yesterday and tomorrow?

I have devoted the last few nights to browsing through the dozens of photographs taken during the reunion week, images both formal and candid that show, without prejudice or judgment, the people we've become. Life has branded us in different ways, packed a few pounds here, etched too many lines there, treated us with the acidity of experience everywhere.

Yet, in the faces of my cousins I can still make out the children who were once my playmates. In the smiles of my aunts and uncles, I can still see the grown-ups who corrected and advised. They are all, without exception, pretty pictures of a clan with one history but different hopes and varying ambitions.

And if I've learned anything, it is this: The latter may mold us but the former grounds us in ways we rarely imagine and too often fail to appreciate.

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