My little sister, Theresa, although fiesty and not lacking a healthy element of spunk, is quite small for her age. Ok, so in all actuality she is just small in general, she being twenty years old, and most likely done in the growth department. Throughout the week she works consistently and closely with junior highers — sometimes also known as Satan’s Spawn — and is consistently and humorously (to those of us not her) mistaken for one. As a direct result of working with such tough clientele the thickness of her skin resembles that of a stubborn elephant on steroids (naturally, an elephant on steroids boasts far thicker skin than most “normal” stubborn elephants). So my point? My little sister is tough, but little. Little like babycarrots, peanuts, elves.
This past weekend she played Counselor Cool T (think: baby-carrots with hip black shades) to a group of ten hyperactive, we love drama and revel in it ALL THE TIME, seventh and eighth grade girls at a winter camp whose grounds were recently sprinkled with a moderate amount of the white stuff. As could probably be easily inferred, snowball fights abounded throughout the weekend. But one Mother Of All Snowball Fights occurred on Saturday, and as my babycarrot sister recounted the details of said snowball fight to me when I picked her up on Sunday, my jaw dropped in disbelief, an expression soon to be replaced with a face-wide look of sheer joy. A look that reflected to her that I approved of her intense seek and destroy methods; the twinkle in my eyes added a “Heck yes, that’s how a Ladish gal ought to act in a snowball fight.” It wasn’t the part where she admitted to running laps around a field until her twelve and thirteen year-old potential assailants became too fatigued to keep chasing her, because although a side-splitting image, babycarrot sister ran cross country and her take to the field and outrun them with distance mentality remains a logical, and effective, plan for baby-carrot-like legs with her stamina.
No, it was her vivid re-telling of how, after being whitewashed and simultaneously gashed across the forehead by a not-to-be-deterred eigth grader(note: this girl is the only girl in babycarrot sister’s cabin smaller than baby-carrot sister herself), she grabbed said eighth grader, put her in a headlock, KICKED her legs out from underneath her, THREW her flailing to the ground (“I threw her, Kerri. THREW her! she told me with a look of timid merriment) , and proceeded to give her a skin-numbing lesson on the proper method of applying The Whitewash.
It’s moments like this when I know for certain that despite our stark physical differences (I am tall, with no hint at resembling anything baby-sized) we really do belong to the same family. And if you thought you could get away with whitewashing either one of us without getting a turn about of (maybe not so) fair play, well, now you know better.
Now you know that snow games with the Ladish girls are not for the faint of heart. We’ll have you headlocked, on your knees, and rolling your face in frozen precipitation before you can say “I love my babycarrot sister.”
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...