LAST WEEK I THREW myself over a huge hurdle. (And I’m still not even sure how I did it.) I completed my MFA thesis reading. My parents came to North Carolina from various corners of the world and my sweet boyfriend traveled all the way from Tokyo to see me read. But even among all the excitement, I was sad to see that one big-baby-man-face was missing from the crowd. That’s right: T was on vacation in Costa Rica. However, my brother did send this congratulatory email in his absence.

Anna,

Good luck with your reading tomorrow. I am proud. I look forward to reading your exceptional work in the future. Please understand that it is not necessary to credit me with all of your inspirations at the end of your reading.
I love you.

Smug, right? But also very sweet.

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I‘M SO VERY GRATEFUL TODAY to have such a fantastic community here on The Sister Project. Merci for reading! It means so much to me. And now a few things I suggest doing on this Thanksgiving day:

• Watch Hannah and Her Sisters. (Don’t you love the Thanksgiving scenes in this movie?)

• Eat some unexpected food. (Seaweed anyone?)

• Make some silly crafts. (Nothing like taking out all that family-induced stress on a piece of felt!)

• Share an unhappy holiday story. (Sometimes you need a good cry. I call mine “The Thanksgiving That Wasn’t.”)

Enjoy!

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HAPPY MOTHERS DAY! Here’s a picture of my mother when she was my age. Isn’t her 1970s style amazing? (She rocks the center part and aviators so well.) I love you, Mama! What are you doing with your mom to celebrate?

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AS I MENTIONED EARLIER this week, I recently spent some time hanging out with my dad while he was visiting North Carolina. We had a great visit that was punctuated by headlocks, non sequiturs, and spontaneous drowsiness. And it really got me thinking how many of you TSP fans ask, “where does your Brother T get his unstoppable goofy streak?” Well let me tell you, dear readers, look no farther than the man in the reflective rainbow sunglasses for that answer.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

I HAVE A SOFT SPOT for this IKEA ad. Maybe because I’m a Cancerian (and therefore a homebody). Or maybe it’s because I’m moving soon and I’ve had lots of nesting urges. Or perhaps it’s because I visited the house where I was born last weekend. (Yes, that must be it.) 

Twenty-four (yikes almost 24!) years later, my first home is barely standing. It’s devastating to see my origins as a pile of rubble, but somehow I still love to visit–especially when the Irises are in bloom.

(video via Capucha)

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MY VERSION OF THE KINDS of phone calls I frequently have with my adult brother (and this sort of thing has been known to happen multiple times a day, mind you):

(phone rings)
Me: “Hello.”
T: (strange breathy sounds) “Uhhhhh, Hi.”
Me: “Oh, hi T. What’s going on?”
T: “This is not T. (dramatic voice change, up three octaves.) This is Mildred.”
Me: (sighing) “Alright Mildred. What do you want?”
T: “Are you bringing coleslaw to the church picnic? Because I was going to bring coleslaw, but I can find the cabbage and I want pickles too. And cabb—”
Me: “Come on, T. What do you want?”
T: “I told you this is Mildred!”
Me: “You were the one who called me. What do you need? I’m working!”
T: (back to normal T voice) “Oh, ok. Um, nothing. I was just—I was just calling to say hey.”
Me: “Ok, hey.”
T: “Hey.”
Me: “Hey.”
T: “I guess I’ll just talk to you later.”
Me: “Ok, bye.”
T: “See ya.”

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"The Spirit of New Year's Eve," made by Geraldine George after Lady's design.

E VERY YEAR since I can remember, my brother T and I adorn our Christmas tree with strings of cranberries and popcorn and with ornaments made of paper snowflakes and dough. We learned these thrifty traditions from our mother, who had learned them from her own mother. Always laboring to make ends meet, my grandmother (whom we affectionately referred to as Lady) decorated her tree with popcorn and cranberries and dozens of handmade egg characters. (My favorite design, left, is “The Spirit of New Year’s Eve” complete with faux lashes and blond bouffant.) Her trees and ornaments are a mainstay in our memories of Christmas.

When her children, my sister-cousins Heather and Jennifer, were young, my aunt Gerry (sister to my mother) remade some of Lady’s original designs for her own tree. T and I used to make our own egg ornaments, but they were more like pastel-less Easter eggs on pipe cleaners and less like intricate faces decorated with yarn and felt. Maybe next year, along with my mother, we will follow in Lady’s and Gerry’s footsteps. But for now, we are slowly coming down from our candy-cane sugar highs, and our thoughts are fixed on New Year’s Eve–dreaming of yellow yarn beehives and luscious silver lashes.

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This is like one of those HIGHLIGHTS Magazine double images, where you have to find what's missing in the image on the right. Tricky, I know.

FRESHMAN YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL is a particularly awkward moment (a timeless characterization, I fear.) I remember spending that time listening to Brandy and Monica on a loop, and putting an inflatable plastic chair in my bedroom. And it seemed as though every time I turned my back to the mirror, a few dozen new pimples appeared any number of places.

As if I wasn’t clumsy enough in my skin, my brother T left for college the September after I turned 14. Our house became strangely quiet. I no longer could saunter downstairs to our finished basement and offer to make sandwiches for T’s stoned friends, or eavesdrop on his phone conversations to hear about the who-drank-what last weekend and the where-will-we-go this weekend.

I anticipated a back-to-normal Thanksgiving, filled with quarrels between my mother and brother and my own shameless attempts to impress T with that one time I smoked pot in Hannah Gold’s pool. But on the Wednesday before that fated holiday, my mother broke down in the kitchen with the freezer door still open. Even though I saw my dad that morning—he dropped me off in T’s car at the bus stop—he wouldn’t be coming home. Ever.

I can’t tell you anything about what actually happened that Thanksgiving. The spongy piece of brain that makes up my memory is divided in two: Before and After. And Thanksgiving 1999 has been lost in the endless murky chasm between those two territories. A holiday in limbo.

After that Thanksgiving I felt nauseated at the thought of impressing T. Things would never be the same (but that, of course, is a much longer story). I still don’t know what my father did that Thursday—while I drifted through one day of purgatory. I think about it often, but it’s something I never asked.

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