It has been almost a month since my big sister died, and I’m still reaching for memories of all the years when we were close. As too often happens, people tend to move around (especially in my family, though I’m the exception). During the ‘70s and ‘80s, two of my sisters and their families moved to Branson, Mo., and being a 10- to 12-hour drive depending on how conscientious you are about speed limits, visits between here and there were increasingly infrequent.
Now, as I reach back to those times housing most of the memories, I’m back in Knoxville, in the first house I remember with any clarity, where we lived from the time I was 2 years old until I was in third grade. I’ve been told because Dorothy was nearly five years old when I was born and long accustomed to being the center of our parents’ world, she had more than a little trouble adjusting to the fact I was there to stay, no matter how ardently she pretended I was only a temporary visitor. Aunt Agnes, living just blocks from our house for a few years after a divorce, often stopped after work and gathered me up to spend the weekend with her so Dorothy could enjoy a couple days of much-needed attention. Once she started school, things were better for both of us as she appointed herself my mentor and entertainment director.
One of the things I remember clearly was an activity we referred to as “playing school.” In actuality, it was a lot more than playing. Dorothy taught me the alphabet, numbers up to 100, the names of the colors of crayons in a box of 36, and well before I was ready for kindergarten, I was reading, spelling, doing simple addition and subtraction and writing (even a little cursive)! She liked to give me “pop quizzes” with, what she called, “trick questions” which basically expected the wrong answers. She told me red was green, and vice versa, and thoroughly confused me by insisting “was” and “saw” were interchangeable. I still stop and think about those two words when writing them and nearly always type them wrong. She taught me all the little songs and poems she learned in school, and her “curriculum” included lots of free drawing, my favorite part of her version of a school day.
Dorothy was very pretty and naturally athletic. By the time she was in her teens, she was playing the saxophone in the school band, showing a definite flair for designing and making her own clothes, and longing to attend a school of dance. Unfortunately, our parents didn’t consider dance to be a sensible and proper career for a young lady, and after graduating high school, she worked as a secretary in different offices at the county courthouse. She married, had a son and continued working, later for a CPA, where she quickly learned to prepare tax returns.
Like most little sisters, I tried to be like her but, as I was even then hopelessly uncoordinated and non-athletic, I could not keep up with her. Once we’d moved to the acreage, there were lots of outdoor activities for the whole family. Dorothy took quickly to ice-skating, swimming, hiking, bicycling and I strove to keep up. There were a number of large maple trees, as well as some old fruit trees tempting her to climb them. Sometimes she would take along a stepladder to help me get started on my tentative attempts to follow in her wake. Usually, by the time she was casually swinging in the topmost branches, I’d be trembling and clinging desperately to a large lower limb, too paralyzed to try to go higher and staring tearfully at the ground that seemed so far below. Dorothy would descend to my level and try to help and reassure me enough so I could get safely back down to earth, but my fear of falling was too great. Eventually, even Dorothy gave up, swinging to the ground, running to the house and telling Mother I was up a tree (again) and couldn’t get down. Mother would phone Dad at work, tell him the problem, and before long I would be safely in Dad’s arms, being deposited on solid ground once again. Neither Dorothy nor I seemed to learn from those episodes. She optimistically encouraged me to try climbing the tree while I, hoping to have magically acquired some marvelous new skill, would, this time, be able to get to the treetop and wave bravely to the world beside my big sister.
A former volunteer and substitute teacher in the Solon schools, Milli is an artist and a poet living near Morse creating unique greeting cards and handmade books.