There is just something about cousins.  A cousin is the perfect person to hang out with.  They are reliably in your life; they have a lot of common ground and memories with you; they probably share a lot of your personality traits.  They don’t have a lot of the problems associated with friends; they also don’t have a lot of the problems associated with siblings… they’re just, perfect.

I’m not sure what’s normal for other people with their cousins, but my experience was just that – perfect.  I grew up knowing my cousins on my Mom’s side very well, and was fortunate enough to have three girls close to my own age.  And since our get togethers consisted of weeks together at Grandma’s house, or on vacation, or at each other’s homes rather than two-hour playdates, our adventures were much grander than mine were or could be with friends.

My favorite cousinal memory is spending one summer building a dam in Johnny Run, the creek behind my grandparents’ home.  This involved a lengthy construction process that extended to include the engineering of stone steps (complete with paved landing) into the embankment in order that we might more easily access our construction zone (can you tell that the oldest cousins were boys? and that they took themselves extremely seriously?).  But when we were finished, we could be down into our manmade tiny swimming hole in a jiffy.

The first round of (eight) cousins has grown up.  And we love to get together and laugh and hang out.  But the second round of (six) cousins is still young.  And I have treasured watching them.  Their play is a bit different than ours was, such as writing, directing, acting, filming, and editing films in the backyard with their Flip cameras and laptops, but it is just as creative and energetic and fun.  And I’m fascinated by the new things they create on the same playing field that I and my set of cousins grew up on.

But some things haven’t changed, like the way they look forward for months to seeing each other; the way the world seems so ripe for the taking when you have such companions as these; the way they have the universe at their fingertips when they open up Grandma’s box of costume jewelry or when they cross the creekbank into unknown forest territory; how crazy and nutso they are when they’re together.

It makes my childhood seem fresh, watching them, and it makes life seem bright.

Andy said the other day, as I shared some of the thoughts that formed the background for my Faces and Voices post, that I was made for another time, a time where ten miles was an infinite distance and families grew and expanded and added and didn’t divide.  Maybe people then wouldn’t view me and my emotional attachment to my family as derisively as today’s world does.  They might understand that family can inspire and enable and not suppress and de-individualize in a way that our culture doesn’t seem to know.

I love mine.  They inspire me.  When I listen to them, I can be all of the things that I keep locked away inside of me.  They remind me that I am a musician, and a writer, and an academic, and a good friend – and not just mousy Leah.  They know me for who I really am, and can show me how to take what I have and create something better out of it.

But I know that there are families that operate differently.  Some families thrive living far apart, even if they are not dysfunctional.  I don’t understand it, but I know it is true.  I am curious about this, and wondering if my golden ideal of older forms of families is really as glossy as I think.  Any reactions?

Tonight I held my baby sister’s hand and noticed a scar on her knuckle.  And I remembered a month before, when she had sliced it on a broken glass that had fallen out of the cupboard.  It was such a happy thought, to know that I had seen every stage of its healing.

I loved this summer.  I loved watching freckles appear, and tears dry, and hair grow, and spirits open and close.  I loved seeing these faces every day.

Her face always shows knowing.  And infinite sympathy.  And depth.

She can laugh so easily, like she is eight years old again.  It makes me feel warm.

Her face is joy.  The most pure joy that exists.  When she smiles, the whole world is better.

He is my heart.  He is unconditional love and affection and just seeing his face fills me up.

He is brilliant and grown up.  But when I look into his eyes, I just see the little boy who used to show me his Legos.

And here are the faces of endless understanding, and patience, and a love that holds us all together and without which we couldn’t exist.

But there is something interesting about just hearing voices over the phone, as well.  To use the voice to imagine and understand.  Undulations in tone can be as powerful as flashes in the eyes.

Or so I tell myself.  Feebly.

Who says that only girls are dramatic?

At least in my family, the men can be just as dramatic as the girls, if not more so.  It doesn’t help that my Dad has a gut-splitting gift for humor, so he can whine and be dramatic all he wants but no one can help doing anything but laughing.

I grew up listening to his horror stories about early haircuts given to him by my Mom.  Apparently some of them made him nervous to go to his night shift on the psych ward for fear of being mistaken for one of the patients.  After listening to those stories I never wanted to give a man a haircut in my life.

But the other day, my hatred of long, untidy men’s hair caused something strange to snap in me.  And before I’d thought it through properly – before I even intended to – my 10 year old brother J was sitting in a kitchen chair, clutching a towel, eyeing me up warily while I read the how-to manual for the clippers and absentmindedly brandished salon scissors.

J, pre-haircut

 I figured that my brothers were safe to try out my skills on.  They don’t go to work, and they don’t really care much about their hair, right?  They never even comb it.  This would be debacle and drama-free.

I was wrong.  After I triumphantly finished, J asked to me to style his hair in “spikes”.  Well, all right… so I did.  And he looked in the mirror and practically passed out as his locks were sticking up about three inches off his head and he looked like Larry in Home Alone 2 after he’s been electrocuted by the basement sink.  And before I could blink, he was back in the chair begging me to please trim it a little bit more.

So I did.  And then he looked in the mirror and practically passed out because now it was too short.  And he smashed the style out of his hair and marched upstairs to confide to my husband that he “hated it.”

Undaunted but feeling a touch sick to my stomach, I practically wrestled my 15 year old brother into the kitchen chair and began chopping away while he whined that if I even tried to come within 10 feet of his head with a bottle of gel he would construct himself a hermetically sealed fortress where he would don a hazmat suit and gas mask and start pelting me with biological weapons.

By this point I was feeling a little wearied by the drama.

After about fifty “oh please, please, have mercy and be done”s, he turned out pretty well and we even got through the gel part of the affair without any pandemic breakouts.

What matter that I couldn’t sleep for feeling terrible about J’s hair, and that I ended spending a bunch of money anyways to buy him special hair wax so that I could do the perfect style on his hair and redeem myself?

(And I did redeem myself.  By the next day, J loved his little haircut.)

Boys aren’t dramatic… oh no.

We had a dog a few years ago.  She was… something sent from the other world to torture us.

So we gave her away to a farm (a real farm, not the proverbial Farm).  This tortured my brother F so much (as he had some strange attachment to The Beast) that my parents soon set about finding a dog more appropriate to our non-daily-catastrophe-loving family.

Still reeling from the monster that had recently left our home, my Dad picked up a little ivory colored fluffy Yorkiepoo with the mildest manners and the emptiest head of any dog that I’ve ever encountered.  (The Beast had empty eyes, but that is because she had to hide the evil plotting going on in her horrid little brain.)

Mitzi the Yorkiepoo, despite her lack of common sense, has very powerful emotions – although they aren’t well directed.  And unfortunately, instead of bonding to F, for whom she had been bought, she decided to bond – and by bond, I mean nuclear fusion bond – to my baby sister, B.

If B is gone (and worse, if Mom is gone too) for any length of time, she mopes.  And by mopes, I mean that she has to be carried outside to go to the bathroom, and won’t eat anything for days on end.  My Dad usually remedies this by frying up her own meal of eggs and cheese, which tempts her for a while and then gets old after a couple of days.

I’ve never seen a dog do backflips before, but when B walks through that front door, Mitzi is just one blur of blonde wispies.  And if B is inaccessible, like in the bathroom or some other inexcusable location, Mitzi whines.  And pads outside the door.  I never need to knock to find out who’s taking too long when Mitzi is curled up outside the bathroom with her nose frantically pressed against the crack under the door.

In the above photo, for instance, B had the unmitigated gall to be eating her dinner on the back porch.

It really is rather touching.  And I’ve always been a touch jealous.  What child didn’t want a dog that faithfully padded at their heels wherever they went?  And although she can’t properly be termed a “family dog” because of her insane blinders for B, and despite my long standing devotion to my own childhood German Shepherd (The Most Wonderful Dog In The World) I’ll admit (don’t tell anyone) that I think Mitzi is super sweet.