Making a Home
To make a complete home you need a complete set of human relations, as per the following list prepared by Nature and endorsed by the best traditions: Husband and father, wife and mother, children, including babies and adolescents; sisters and brothers, grandfather, grandmother, guests, and a dash of neighbors and friends.
If you lack any one of these items you miss something—the home is not perfect. If there is one of these relationships you have never known, your life is by so much maimed. It is the fashion to speak disparagingly of relatives, but they art a part of the environment of Nature, and if you get nothing but annoyance from them something ails you. You might as well curse the sun and stars as hate relatives.
Blessed is the man, and thrice blessed the woman, that loves the people that ought to be loved. There are grandmother and grandfather, for example. The child that has them not has missed one of the sweetest elements that make memory happy. They understand children better than parents, for they have learned that so many things that worry parents are not much matter.
And plenty of brothers and sisters. A solitary child in a house is a lame soul. He can never get that sound view of the world that comes to the member of a full family. As for babies, it is only a sort of imitation family where there are none. The very best ingredients of our character come from dealing with babies.
And I love a houseful of young folks, of the courting age. The only wholesome, delightful, and cheering disease in or out of the medicine books is lovesickness. When we grow past its agonizing stages we still ought to see it in others around us.
Most cranks and dried-up folks and pessimists and disagreeable people are victims of small families. They have been deprived of that wholesome flow of humanities that comes from a full set of relations.
—Frank Crane.
Alternate Reading: Acts 13:1-12.