SIBLING REVELRY (2025-33)

The house on Elm Street
in the process of being built.

In our little church congregation in Pittsburgh PA we held our Sunday School meetings on Sunday mornings, then returned to the church again for Sacrament Meeting on Sunday evening. The in-between was often a chance to have friends over who didn't live near us and went to different schools. Or we would spend the afternoon at their houses. It was the original Primary Friend to Friend program.

There were three basic time "zones" in our Ward. There was the scheduled time for Sacrament meeting - 5:00 pm

Then there was Mormon Standard time, which was somewhere between 5:03 and 5:05.

Then there was Hansen Standard Time, which was any given point after that.

It's fitting, then, that I would give a nod to my beloved siblings a day late.

I'm number 6 of 7 distinct individuals with one common heart, one common mother and two absent fathers. There's probably a whole decade of therapy sessions underlying our life stories. But I can testify that common struggle seems to either make or break families. Fortunately, for us, struggle seems to have stitched us pretty tight.

Since the seven of us live in three different states we have a text thread between us. At some point I will preserve the years of discussions between us and there'll be a pretty good representation of who we are and how the puzzle of us fits together. 

A few months ago, in a moment of silent reminiscence, I found myself trying to pull up memories of my early childhood in Shelley Idaho. Most of my memories are from Pittsburgh, where we moved when I was 5 years old. My pre-Pittsburgh recollections are limited and probably distorted. I sense that most of them are triggered by the limited number of photographs we have of that era in our family history. My pondering led me to the deep dig of trying to remember the layout of our little house on Elm Street in Shelley. 

I sent out a text to the Sibs asking them to sketch a a rough layout of our house. I sketched mine before the older ones sketched theirs. 

The house, with maybe 900 square feet of finished space, housed nine of us. It had 2 real  bedrooms. I think maybe the babies slept in a closet, though my older sisters would have to confirm that. The basement is where older kids slept. Apparently they drew lines on the cement floor to establish boundaries. I must not have spent time down there, but the older siblings sure did. Ann Marie Libby and I, affectionately known as the Three Little Girls, must have filled the upstairs space. Libby and AM straddled me by just over a year on either side. I am strangely jealous of the magical space in the basement that became the bedrooms of my older brothers and sisters. 

Sue and John decided, at some point, that Thursday nights would be Laughing Night. Don't you just love the idea of setting aside a night for laughing?

Anyway, since yesterday was National Siblings Day, and it happened to fall on a Thursday, I wanted to acknowledge I have the best siblings in the world. Happy Laughing Siblings Day, on Hansen Standard Time.