When Your Sisters Are Your Lifeline {& a special invitation}

When my sister Gina and I were little, we stayed at my Mamaw’s trailer a lot while Mama worked two jobs trying to put food on the table.  Daddy and Mama were divorced and Daddy had a hard time staying sober.  Looking back, though we were loved, chaos wrapped around us like summer vines slithering up the sides of everything.

The only bright spot on that hot summer mountain were the gerber daisies that Mamaw helped us plant from the benevolence Easter basket the country church brought us on good Friday.  We watched those flowers for weeks, inching up little by little, declaring that hope could thrive in the most unlikely places, if given half a chance.  Finally, Sister had had enough of me bragging about my pretty yellow daisy and how much taller it was growing than hers.  One sticky July afternoon, she broke it off at its root.

Mamaw came unglued and I knew that the sins Sister paid for that day were not just her own.  At first, I tried to protect my little sister and get between her and the switch but after my arm got grazed, I lost my courage and cried and begged Mamaw not to do it.

From the last part of Chapter 8:

That night, I lay in the twin bed beside Sister and felt the heat coming off the welts on her little legs. Despair came over me, and I wanted to ease this pain for her but was unable even to articulate the pain I felt myself. I hoped Aunt Glenda would come and get us the next day so we could play with my cousin Jamie and get out of this place. I wanted to go home, even if Mama had to leave us by ourselves all day and night. I wanted to be anywhere but here. If only it could be my legs that were hot with stripes, and not Sister’s.

We just lay there, both of us staring down a hard reality—that so little in our lives could be rightly accounted for.

I wanted to hug Sister and tell her that we all do bad things and that Mamaw had whipped her too hard. Or tell her I wish’t that I had the nerve to break a daisy off at its root, which was the kind of outright rebellion I would never have the stomach for.

But I didn’t do or say anything. I lay awake, alone with my regret and emptiness, mad at myself for not protecting her, inching over to the edge of the bed to give her plenty of room to sleep, careful not to rub up against her legs.

***

My sister is the strongest and yet kindest woman I know and today is her birthday. I thought it’d be the perfect time to tell her how much I love her and to thank her for taking such good care of me all these years, gerber daisy  notwithstanding.

(I’d actually love to try to recreate this picture but I’m gonna need a nice velvet shirt and a good Shawn Cassidy shag. My sister still makes that same face, by the way.)