Erin is seven and a half years older than I am, so she was in double digits by the time I formed my first memories of her. They were, as they so often are, of bath time. Erin helped my mom bathe my brother and me, and when my mom wasn’t in the room, Erin and Mark played a fun little game of Trick Emily, She’s Innocent and Gullible. They would say, “Emmy, Emmy, there’s something on the wall behind you. Stand up and see what it is.” I’d stand up to take a look and my sister would promptly zerbet my butt. Mark and Erin laughed and laughed as I sat back down in indignation. Then they’d pull it again. “Really, Em, there’s something there. I promise I won’t do it again.” You know how this ends.
Erin didn’t walk through the house. She ran. She ran, and she jumped up and hit every doorframe on her way. Leaping and running, leaping and running. You’d hear her smack the frame with her hand, and then you’d probably hear her smack her toes on the coffee table or dresser or fireplace or piano. She never knew where her toes were in relation to the rest of her body. “Ouch! It ‘urts. It ‘urts,” was an everyday refrain.
She was a pretty good kid, but she acted up from time to time. One time she had been grounded (for whatever reason) and told that she couldn’t have any friends over. I’m betting she was around thirteen at the time. My parents left her home alone while she was grounded, so naturally she invited her friend Amanda over to hang out. Erin’s bedroom was above the garage, so when my parents came home early, much to Erin’s surprise and dismay, she heard the garage door open from her room. With only moments to plan her friend’s escape, she grabbed Amanda’s hand and ran down the upstairs hall to my bedroom, whose window opened to the roof of the screened-in porch behind the house. Downstairs was too dangerous. There was only one way out now. She forced Amanda out my bedroom window and onto the porch roof. The roof slanted toward the ground, of course, so it gave Amanda a few more feet of safety, but it was still a giant fall. Poor Amanda, petrified, perched on the edge of the roof and surveyed her future down below. Erin whisper-screamed, “JUMP!” Amanda shook her head. “Jump right now!” Head shake. “Amanda, get your butt off the roof!” A deep breath and a flying leap.
My parents didn’t find out for years.
Erin didn’t invite me along to play with her and her friends, but she didn’t exactly exclude me either. Sometimes, she dedicated whole evenings just for me. I wanted nothing more in the whole world than a Barbie house. I had loads of hand-me-down Barbies, but no hand-me-down house. Erin solved the problem by building me whole Barbie houses out of household items. The structure was made of books (the Children’s Classics series was particularly useful for stairs), and the furniture came from sundries she found lying around. The little three-legged plastic white things that came in pizza boxes were Barbie coffee tables. The rubber hot water bottle was a Barbie couch. Erin’s Barbie mansions were three stories tall and full of small surprises. She’d lock herself in her room while she worked; then she’d bring me in for the grand reveal. A year or two later, a friend gave me a real Barbie Dream House. I found it deeply disappointing.
Erin showed me how to do cartwheels and headstands. She had a pair of giant pom-poms, ‘80s style, and she taught me a few cheers. She showed me how to play “Heart and Soul” on the piano. She had a special way of making me feel like I was big stuff.
When she was 16 or 17, Erin took me to a haunted walk for Halloween. You can’t imagine how excited I was to go out with my sister, just the two of us. She borrowed a friend’s truck and played me a song from her friend’s tape collection. “You’ll like this one, Em,” she said, and played this song. I was rolling with my sister, listening to a song about pretty brown eyes like ours. It was worth every second of screaming my head off on the haunted walk.
Our family was close with another family that had two girls. Jennifer was near Erin’s age (probably about 16 at the time) and Katy was near mine (somewhere around 9 or 10). We were all having a sleepover one night, Jen and Erin doing their thing, Katy and me doing ours, when Erin and Jen decided they were going to sneak out. They debated and schemed in the bedroom. We could wear black and go out the window. We can’t let Katy and Em hear us. If we’re quiet when we pass Mom and Dad’s bedroom… Etc. They were just getting up the nerve to go when they heard Katy and me in the living room. They came out to find that we had just returned from a midnight walk around the block. We had gone out the front door, naturally, and returned by the same method. Sometimes the younger girls can teach the older girls a thing or two.
I remember going out with Erin when she was about eighteen. We were starting to look more alike as I got older, and people were calling me “Little E.J.” She curled her hair in hot rollers most days, so she did mine the same way on this particular night. I can remember sitting on the chair in the dining area while she dabbed a little bit of makeup on me. We drove in the Jeep with the top down and visited her boyfriend (hot stuff), who was working at the ice cream shop. She bought me a scoop of Rocky Road and I basked in the glory of everyone saying we looked so much alike.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that she had lost her mischievous side. Around that same time, I was trying my darndest to do the splits. My friend Jenny and I were stretching every single day. I couldn’t do a front split, but I was getting closer and closer to a side split. At long last, I did it. I had won!
Erin was in the front yard when I ran up to the house, shouting that I had finally done it. “Erin! Erin! I did it! I did the splits! I did the splits!”
“Oh, you mean like this?” she said, as she dropped into a perfect front split.
She was a lifeguard at the local pool, and I remember one night at the pool in particular. Erin and all of her lifeguard friends were closing down after hours, but they let me stay. The pool had three enormous slides that were usually governed by strict rules, but after hours, anything went (shhhh). Erin let me slide face-first and do some spins while she cleaned up and clocked out. I had ridden my bike to the pool, but Erin packed it into the back of the Jeep and gave me a ride home. She was full-on eighteen years old at the time, and I was eleven, so I was used to Erin having an active social life that took place largely outside our home. She was often out with friends, often home late. I had already considered it a special night because she let me stay late at the pool, but when we got home, she said, “Hey, Em, I’m in the mood for blueberry muffins. Want to bake some with me?” It was already 11:00, but I was all in. We stayed up and made muffins and talked.
As busy as Erin was, she often made time for us to be together. If she was home at night on the weekends, she’d sometimes invite me to sleep in her room so we could stay up to talk and listen to music together. I don’t know what we talked about, but I remember the feeling of peace and fun. I just liked to be with her. I also remember that she’d often read a chapter or two of the Bible to me while I drifted off to sleep.
She made chocolate pudding in champagne flutes and topped it with whipped cream. To this day, I think all puddings should be served in champagne flutes.
She was the worst brownie maker ever. They always burned.
We moved to Kentucky the same year Erin entered her freshman year of college. Erin was in Kentucky with us for about a month before she embarked on her new life out of the house, so most of our Kentucky friends didn’t know her at all. It always bothered me that people there didn’t think of her when they thought of our family. I wanted everyone to see how great she was. I wanted them to know that I had an older sister and that she was adventurous. She was in just about every sport in high school, not because she was passionate about any of them, but because she was willing to try anything and just wanted to have fun with other people. She sang in front of our church of hundreds. I’d never have the guts to do that. She was hot enough that she got asked out by an airman when she was working at the pool, which is just about the coolest thing that can happen to a recent high school grad, but she was lame enough to take him to church for their date. She literally took him to church.
Today is Erin’s birthday, and it’s a BIG ONE. She is now a wife and mother. In fact, she’s a super-mother of seven kids. She’s ridden all kinds of waves--the same that we all face in our adult years--and she’s done it with such grace. Erin and I still talk too late into the night every time we see each other. We’ve done it when she’s had to get up with infants in the wee hours of the morning. We’ve done it the nights before our weddings, when we were desperate for sleep but too worked up to close our eyes. We’ve talked too late on school nights and work nights.
We talk on the phone only once every couple of months. I told her recently that our problem is that we wait too long to call each other, so when we do talk, we have two months of conversation to catch up on and we stay on the phone for a couple of hours. That means we have to set aside a few hours for a phone call, which makes us wait longer to call each other. I suggested we talk every week or two. Then we’d only be on the phone for a half hour or so, and we’d stay in touch better. We tried that for about three weeks, only to find that we were talking two hours every time, just the same.
Erin has counseled me through all sorts of decisions. She has listened when I’ve been stressed, and she has gently prodded me when she felt it was needed. She kept me from making at least one serious error, when I was thinking about dating a boy I shouldn’t have been thinking about dating. She loves completely, and gives of herself to those she loves. I couldn’t be luckier to have such a sister on my side. Plus, look at them gams!
I love you, Erin. Happy hmumrrmptieth birthday!
