We've met all the way from Little River in Mendicino County to Solvang south of Santa Maria, from Sacramento to Sausalito. We've met in hotels, motels, resorts and bed and breakfasts.

One of us arranges the place and the time. We take turns with this chore. Traditionally it has been for two nights and two days.

But even though the reunion is almost always in a different place, it's also always about the same.

We don't do much during the 48 hours and usually we do about the same things. We eat and swim and lie in the sun. Sometimes we walk. Now and then we see the local attraction, anything from a beach to a museum. But mostly we talk. We tell the same stories we've told every year about our growing up.

Growing up together is what we have in common. By now we all know these growing up stories by heart, but it's somehow reassuring to be able to remember them and to tell them to one another all over again. Usually they're funny, once in a while sad, but always they're memorable.

We also spend a lot of time trying to remember who is related to whom. Somehow this seems important, although I suppose it really isn't. But the family is large and there are lots of branches to remember.

Of this larger assembly, we tend to think we are a unique group, that because this has been an annual event for so long it's unique, too, but I suppose it really isn't all that unusual.

Still we're all first cousins and although we're not all the first cousins in the family, we're all the first cousins who are about the same age. What's more, we're all the first cousins in the family with the same heritage.

Some way all of us have a connection with Napa. Either we grew up there or we visited our grandparents there or lived there at some time in our childhoods. It was, of course, a different Napa than the one that exists now--a smaller, quieter, less affluent place, a small town surrounded by orchards, some of them owned by members of our family.

We remember picking prunes and swimming in creeks and walking dusty roads, riding tractors and horses and having Fourth of July picnics with homemade ice cream and cakes and pies made in nearby kitchens.

We remember watching hay being baled and cows milked by hand and water troughs green with moss and picking blackberries and eating them warm at the edges of the fields and pumping water by hand from the well and long hot summer nights.

We remember huge Christmases and Thanksgivings so large they required three turkeys.

All this, of course, is because we are of a certain age. Most of us are at, near or over 80.

When we first started these annual gatherings there were 11 of us. But time has made its inroads and taken its toll and now there are only eight of us left. Most of those who remain are female. Only the oldest and youngest males are still around.

Age also makes us spend some of our time together talking about those things old people talk about when they get together: their ailments, their medications and their infirmities.

And more and more we find we are thinking about moving closer to one or the other of our children. It's a kind of protective mechanism. We don't really want to be a burden to our children. On the other hand, it's somehow reassuring to be close to one of them.

The move isn't coming this year. Well, we hope it isn't. But it might next year or perhaps the year after that.

Moving inevitably will alter the composition and perhaps even the future of the reunions. We can see that coming, but not with any enthusiasm. Somehow, it seems as if we ought to be able to go on forever, that we might never age, nor change nor forget, but we know just as inevitably that it is going to happen someday.

A couple of times we've tried to expand the reunion, to encompass the larger family, to get our children together, but it's never become a tradition like our gatherings. Once or twice we have assembled most of them. It's an impressive gathering, but it has never become a permanent arrangement.

Perhaps that's because they don't have the same common childhood we share. Perhaps it's because they grew up in a different time, in a time when small towns were or had disappeared, when there were no longer family ranches in California, in a time when it wasn't possible for them to share a common heritage as we did.

Whatever it was, it never worked and we remain the unique group in the larger, but less cohesive family.

We look forward to next year somewhere on the central California coast. We hope all of us will be there.

We know it's going to be a great time. We already know what we're going to talk about, too.