This is what my family looked like most weekends. Here you see my parents, grandparents and me at the gate of Fort Henderson Farm. Yes, we are stylish (don’t be jelly about my sweet kicks and tight ankle roll, or my how my permanent is so righteously lifted by the hill country breezes). The Farm is where we just went to be — to be nibbling on toaster oven American cheese chalupas, sipping on sherry and cold Cokes, watching the deer feed and taking short post-supper strolls down to the creek with Nutsy, which I think is what we doing here in this picture because, dur, my grandmother is def in her exercise outfit. The Farm was a place to practice family togetherness — and it’s a legacy that has remained.

This legacy began a generation before when my grandmother’s father and one of his brother’s bought some property in the Texas Hill Country. The goal? Family togetherness. And this is what that looked like in the mid-1940s:

This picture at the Fort Henderson Farm gate features some of the same folks from the first photo including my grandfather Woodsy (sitting on the bumper at the left), my grandmother Bobbie (in the sassy shorts at the far right), and my mom (standing atop the gate at the left of the photo). My great grandfather valued and promoted family togetherness and passed it on.

Here’s a photo of my children, Ben and Marley, with their cousins at the same gate two generations later.

Same gate, same farm, same smiles because the legacy of family togetherness is a powerful, eternal manifestation of joy. One of those beautiful daughters is raising her family at the Farm today. I just love everything about that! It’s proof of such an important lesson: leaving a legacy of family togetherness by facilitating and encouraging routine family conventions — whether they are recurring at a familiar retreat like Fort Henderson Farm, in your home, a vacation destination or somewhere new and notable each time — is contagious and modifies your family’s genes for more of the same.