It’s when I’m in nature that a feeling of total elation suddenly passes over me, and I recognize what that feeling represents: memories from childhood when I was completely one with nature as it beckoned me in to play and get lost in my imagination.
The memories are of times spent with my sisters, Melanie and Michele, playing in the woods of the isolated places where my parents had their houses. Maybe our deep-rooted bond came from that isolation, with no one to play with but each other, or maybe from our desire to escape our father’s thunderous roar. Whatever the reason, my sisters have always been my everything, breaking trail to make life easier for me as I grew up.
Melanie and Michele
Having two older sisters who didn’t whine and liked to climb trees was a bonus. Melanie, the oldest by three years, was, and still is, powerful, and she taught me how to accept personalities so different from my own. With long, thick, curly chestnut hair and a stallion-like body made for a bikini, she turned me on to Led Zeppelin and showed me what it felt like to be cool. She introduced me to the world of acting, producing and casting plays in which we softly bullied the neighborhood boys into dressing as girls to perform in our backyard, which made the perfect stage. The best part about Melanie growing up was the scary boyfriends who revved up the driveway on their motorcycles, cigarettes in mouths, hair blowing in the wind, sans helmets.
In high school, Melanie loved to show off her baby sister. Between classes I’d suddenly be barraged by a gang of seniors, embracing me with bear hugs and running their fingers over my cheeks to check out the peach-skin softness Melanie spoke of. She ruined me, that Melanie Mouse, making me feel so adored. One can’t possibly live up to that reputation all one’s life… but one can certainly try.
Michele was the total tomboy. Independent, petite and always willing to try anything, she was the one who lured us deeper into the woods, finding sand dunes to leap off and sledding hills with no runout, where you’d have to bail before meeting your demise. We played on the hills of the golf course belonging to the private country club behind the woods of our backyard, a club that excluded Jews and Black people. At that age I had no idea why they wouldn’t want intelligent, entertaining people around. I just chalked it up to their being stuffy and boring. Our revenge was letting loose our completely untrained German shorthaired pointer, who would race off to their golf course and deposit lifeless ducks on our doorstep. Other revenge tactics included blowing dandelion seeds onto their manicured lawns and poaching their swimming pools on warm summer nights. Kids have their passive-aggressive ways of retaliating.
Like the most playful kittens, we three sisters couldn’t stay away from each other, pawing at each other one second and tearing each other’s hair out the next. We became proficient at holding our hair from the top when facing each other’s anger so it didn’t hurt as much, and we tumbled through life intertwined, always playing, always wrestling. We weren’t of the computer and cell phone generation, so we were present, and everything we did, we did to the fullest.
Most of our time was spent swinging from the boughs of our favorite pine tree, which stood where our yard met the forest. Climbing its branches, we’d reach the tippy-top to get a much wider view beyond the insular world we knew too well. It was safe under that massive pine, our go-to place when we weren’t playing flashlight tag at night with all the rough neighborhood boys or launching off the sand dunes that eventually got leveled like the home we lived in. We chased stars and boys with the fireflies until the dinner bell rang, summoning us home.
The Room Above the Garage
But life wasn’t always charming. As the third child, I was given the worst and coldest room in the house, above the garage, with a dark back staircase leading to the kitchen. My only comfort was hearing my mother washing the dishes as I fell asleep, which led me to yell out a litany of things she had to do so I could actually drift off: “Don’t go in the den (too far away from me), don’t turn the lights off, kiss me good night again before you’re finished.” The list got longer as I grew into a toddler… and shorter as my high school boyfriends began climbing onto our roof and sneaking into my window.
It was scary back there in my little room. To get to my parents’ room, I had to either traipse through Melanie’s bedroom, which connected me to the other side of the house, or travel down that dark back stairway with a Narnia-like closet at the top. (All our closets were Narnia-like; some felt more villainous than others.)
Depending on the mood of Melanie, who became a teenager way too early, that hallway door wasn’t always open to me, so I often lay in bed staring at the darkest closet of all, my own. With a vast imagination, that closet brought on recurring nightmares of the door slamming open and dragging me violently into an evil vortex, tossing me about in the darkness. The nightmare lasted well into adulthood and only ended when the house, and the hill it stood on, was leveled by new owners who built a contemporary monstrosity.
On the dark days when Melanie had the door closed, I’d summon the courage to knock. Hesitantly she’d open it to find me in my footie pajamas, thumb in mouth, curly hair spilling wildly in all directions, demanding passage with a Swiss Army knife in my hand as my sword. Assessing the benign situation, she’d laugh at me and slam the door in my cute, cherubic face. There I’d be, left standing alone in the darkness, just me and the sharp-toothed beasts waiting to pounce from inside the stairway closet, a hair’s breadth away.
All would be fine in the morning, though, when I’d wake to find myself uneaten, with the sun streaming through my windows and the birds chirping outside.
