Siblings

It was after this picture was taken that I realized how wrong it is to tuck t-shirts into pants of any kind. At least for us short waisted pear shaped people it is. This is one of my favorite pictures of me, my sister Tara, and my brother Zeke. Incidentally, I have just remembered a friend objecting to white tights. Hmm. I will stand firm on the tights issue. I wouldn't wear them now for fear of looking like an enormous cloud drift, but back then when I had a waist and thinner legs? I still think they look fine. This same (very dear) friend of mine also objected to my white sunglasses.

Cam- what's up with your objections to white accessories?

Part of why I love this picture is that in our adult lives we have all lived so distantly from each other and this picture reminds me of how much a part of who I am is also a part of who they are. I feel confident in saying that we all have very strong personalities and when we walk into a room the air moves around us and people notice. Partly people notice us because I used to tuck my t-shirts in but mostly it's because we (as a group) look a lot like each other and my brother is a babe magnet in spite of his extremely blunt personality and my sister has big blue orbs for eyes with long lashes and an intriguing habit of being all at once super-mellow-girl and impossibly uptight which creates a great deal of fascination for me and everyone else around her.

I like being reminded that we all belong in each other's lives because I have often looked at them as being somehow separated from me by a glass barrier. I look at them and have a thousand opinions (many of them wrong, I'm sure!) about who they are but I have often felt invisible to them. Not because they ignore me, because they don't. Well, Zeke does generally, but he ignores everyone so it hardly signifies. Who do they think I am? I know they love me but I don't know how they see me.

And, of course, they're probably wrong anyway.

(Just amusing myself there.)

I feel a great deal of love for my siblings. Both of them have matured so much and come so far and lately I've been feeling more pride for them than ever before.

Zeke is an incredible artist and has been working really hard to pull his growing body of work into a show and his work almost makes me cry it's so poignant and so perfect a way for him to express the world he sees and to put beauty side by side with the very brutal nature of life in run down urban settings. Zeke is a tough character with a chivalrous side that has been known to land him in jail for a night. He's straightforward, totally honest, argumentative, handsome, stubborn, weirdly conservative, restless, a loyal friend, a much loved uncle, and in spite of his gruff nature, is a caring and kind person.

I don't even know how to begin a description of Tara. I first realized what an incredible person she was when she made me a little book in school when she was a young teen. This book was so sweet and made me realize how much I had overlooked her and spent too much time resenting her as a kid. I experience a great deal of guilt over our early years but I've reconciled that guilt in my heart. I changed her diapers, I helped feed her, I baby-sat her. But I didn't really see her until she was a teen and she went to live with our dad and I lived with our mom after they divorced. She's an excellent letter writer, scholar, and is beginning a career as a therapist in a social work environment which I think she'll be excellent at doing. She's working on her second master and there's so much I want to say about her all at once that my head becomes a jumble.

Tara is easily as contrary a person as I am. (Though I don't know if she fully realizes this yet?). She is honest, sweet, warm, impatient with people's annoying foibles, she's sometimes blunt, she is gorgeous, smart, a loyal friend and sister, her nephew wants to live with her instead of me*, she's funny, she's brave, she's an extremely hard worker, she's indecisive, she's a worrier, she is dutiful when it's important, she's independent, she's completely liberal, she has a bottomless conscience, she's earthy, she's sharp, she is stubborn, argumentative (see a familial trend there?), she can't resist a cat's charm, she's restless, she hates a lot of the same films I do, she's going to marry Luke Wilson some day, she is a lot of fun to hang out with, and she's going to keep getting better and better.

Both of them have been known to drive me crazy at times.

If they weren't already my siblings I would wish they were. I don't think a person needs to have siblings to have a great sense of family, I think if you don't have them you find them amongst your friends. I know that I have friends I consider my sisters in spirit.

But if you have siblings, it's wonderful when they're the kind of people you'd choose to be friends with if you hadn't already spent your childhood bickering endlessly with them about who gets the last peanut butter ball or who gets to sit facing forward in the family van or who is just plain wrong.