This is the home where I became a big sister. As chaotic and crazy as the house on Nettle Tree Road was…this one was fairly quiet. Dad and Jackie were busy trying to settle into a new life… create a family…appear to have a normal life and for the most part that happened. Except when my mother would come over…and poke the hornets nest. She was not going to go down quietly and in many ways I admire that about her. Dad and Jackie were eager to just move on and my mother's presence was a continual reminder of what had happened and the choices that were made…
She didn’t come over a lot but when she did it was an epic battle. Fists, pushing, shoving shouting and on one occasion I swear there were clothes flung out onto the yard but I don’t know if this is just something I imagined or if it really took place.
In the in between of that chaos…life really did settle into some normalcy…and I use that term loosely. I was really excited to be a big sister and I adored Sherri from the get go. I remember going to our neighbors house when she was just a baby. This neighbor was going to babysit us while Dad and Jackie went out…and while we were there Sherri was crying up a storm…and I was DISTRESSED. I could not understand why this neighbor lady was so incompetent that she could not get my little sister to stop crying.
So after a long stretch of wailing I finally worked up the nerve to march over to her and tell her “If you give the baby to me I can make her stop crying” and the neighbor lady shooed me off and kept bouncing Sherri up and down which only made the crying worsen. She never gave Sherri to me but I remember just sitting on the couch the entire time so frustrated because I was certain that all she needed was her sister.
At this stage of my life, I was deeply infatuated with baton twirling and wanted desperately to belong to the twirling club that marched in the parades in town. They had streamers on the ends of their batons and they wore white cowboy boots with tassels on them and I thought that was just about the greatest thing I had ever seen and I coveted them for years.
I remember this house had a carport that my dad never really pulled into and I would spend my days riding my bike in circles in the carport or putting on my roller skates and going round and round and round. I loved the way skates felt on smooth concrete and would zone out to the sound they made while I sped around in those circles.
Jackie was really into plants and she had a terrarium a really big terrarium that was round and on a stand and it had all these plants in it and at one time we had some little frogs in there too and I remember she would put it out on the carport and I would have to be careful not to bump it when I skated and I was always afraid the frogs were going to jump out of the hole on top.
All of the boys from my moms first marriage moved in with us to this house on Sugarland…which I suppose had to be really weird for them because suddenly their sister was the mother of the home…but nonetheless they were there…David the youngest was always super creative and he and the neighbor kid would make movies in our garage off the carport. I remember one time they wanted me to play the secretary and as I typed I would scoot along with the bar on the typewriter and when it reached the end of the page they wanted me to fall onto the floor… they thought it would be the funniest thing ever but after about fifteen takes of me hitting the floor I failed to see the humor in it.
I can tell you the name of neighbors…I can remember the monkey bars the girls next door had…I can remember on hot summer days how the humidity would cause that terrarium to steam up but I cannot for the life of me remember how long we lived in this house…but I think it was quite a while.
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Questions for the Day:
• Do you remember when you became a big sister or brother?
• Do you have any stories from babysitters that you remember?
• What did you like to spend your days doing, where you a bike rider, or a skateboarder or a dancer?
• Were there pieces of furniture or items from your childhood home that you remember for some reason?
• Did your brothers or sisters ever make you go along with some of their plans and schemes and big ideas?
• Did you have a special neighbor that was important growing up?
Of course you don’t have to answer all of them or any of them for that matter… but if any of them made you think… I’d love for you to capture those thoughts so you have them to share… because they are worth being heard!
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