“When We Were Little” Wednesday

When I was little, I shared a room with my younger sister. This was usually okay, despite our many differences. Don’t think for a second that we never disliked it – we certainly had times with masking tape lines down the middle of the room and tiffs over who was on whose side, but the times of playing together happily outnumbered the times that required parental intervention. (That’s how it is in my memory, anyway.)

Ashley and I played together well. Only 15 months apart, we had a ready-made playmate whenever we wanted one. (The time eventually came when I didn’t always want her to play with me…..but I always came around.) We loved our Barbie dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids, and Legos. We would get up early on Saturday mornings – before anyone else in the house was up – not to watch cartoons, but to play together on the floor in our room. We made forts and campsites on our beds, and sometimes – sometimes – our sister Angelia would join us.

As we got older and needed more room, our parents found some bunk beds for us. Ashley took the top, and I took the bottom. While we no longer had “sides” of the room to claim as our own, we did have neat apartments for when we played house together. During the night, when Ashley would laugh or talk or do something odd in her sleep, I would press my feet against the bottom of her bed and lift her up. Often, too, odds and ends from her bed would fall onto mine through the crack by the wall, and I would wake up wondering, “What is this thing, and how did it end up in my bed?”

When our older sister moved out, we got our own rooms….at last. As happy as I was, at 12, to have my own room, I missed my sisters. Things were never the same……but we’ve tried to keep them that way, as though we all were near neighbors across the hall from my parents. Good times.