Like In Stories

Perhaps you think it’s nothing
Lost in the mess of life
Often no good can come of pain
Though often enough, you forget the joy of dancing in the rain

I’ve been thinking today about how my brother met his wife. Their’s is my second favorite love story and not, as some of my friends would likely say, because of how they met, but because they’ve had hard times and worked hard to come through them as they entered them.

Together.

Because when something or someone is the most important to you, you aren’t going to let anything else get between you or they. They loved each other and wanted to always stand together even if they were trying not to fall over as the ground rumbled and heaved beneath them. I’ve watched their love for one another grow and it is beautiful.

As for how they met?

They were introduced over a dead body.

They had both been called to stay with a friend who had gone to check on an elderly relative only to find said relative had passed. My brother and sister-in-law managed to get there before paramedics and sat with their friend in the room with his relative. So they were introduced over a dead body.

Their friend was at their wedding and reception and said something about how only these two would make a connection at a time like that, but he was glad they did so.

We always need a reminder that there are good things in life, most especially when it seems life is at its darkest for us.

 

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Choice

There comes a point where you have to decide what you’re going to do with your life. His sister had made her choice long ago and while he hadn’t wanted to live with her decision, he’d had to.

Now…

Now he had to make a decision about how he was going to live.

For someone that hadn’t made a decision that affected just him not even once in his life, that was going to be all but impossible.

But he would learn.

It wasn’t like he had a choice now.

(You always have a choice.)

Thimble Enough – Thankful Thursday

You never know just what’s going to be useful in your life. I’ve used the sewing skills my mom insisted all of us learn (boys and girls) to mend my clothes, sew buttons back on pants, shirts, coats and sweaters. Put zippers in, design Halloween costumes, work on wedding clothes, decorations, mittens for a duck’s feet when she had infects wounds on them and wouldn’t stay off her feet (our first duck was a very stubborn creature) and now I’m using them to sew old feed bags together to make a tarp for the back of the truck.

Incidentally, I am also incredibly thankful for a thimble, because I shudder to think about the state of my fingers without that thimble.

Thanks, Mom, for being more stubborn than seven of your eight children when it came to learning how to hand sew simple stitches. (My youngest brother just went and hid and Mom had two jobs to get to and didn’t have the time to chase her youngest down to make him learn what the other seven already knew and he just wouldn’t learn it from the rest of us. He is ruing that now when the buttons on his clothes wear off and he has to wait to bring it to one of our houses to sew back on. My eldest brother was incredibly thankful all throughout his mission that he’d stuck out the sewing lessons and even knew how to use the sewing machines that the church members in his branch let him borrow.)

Check out the original Thankful Thursday.  (I will update the link when this week’s original post goes up.)

Paths of the Dead – One-Liner Wednesday

My older brother told me that the contrails left by planes (that I hadn’t seen fly over the house earlier and so just thought were strange clouds) were the paths that dead spirits used to get to the next stage in life and I believed him for almost ten years before I figured it out.

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Check out the original One-Liner Wednesday. (Will update link…eventually…)

Books – Thankful Thursday

Books are a big part of my family. All of us love books and getting a book, even one bought from a library book sale, is more than acceptable as a gift for any time of the year. So we all have little personal libraries as well as a communal house library for each house that a group of us live in.

Today is a new year and I know that this year I will finally be able to get my book collection back from my youngest brother. I am looking forward to reading through them all over again after being separated from them for almost four years. (Though I am also very grateful that he was able to hold them for me for so long. Without him, I would have lost all of the books.)

So I guess today I’m not only thankful for the (hopefully soon) return of my books, but for the books being able to be returned.

I have had too much sugar and am now temporarily shutting down. It’s one of those days.

Make sure to check out the original Thankful Thursday for the first time this year though! (Smiles Don’t worry, I’ll include the link to this week’s post as soon as it goes up.) Also, check out the Just Jot January prompt as well!

EDIT: The link to this week’s original Thankful Thursday has been added. Go check it out!

Female Overload – SoC

There is always a degree of separation involved in any kind of family living style. It can vary greatly on the amount of people you live with, the age of those people and how much space you have as a whole in which to live. Cultural norms for a family also effect this.

Living with a bunch of sisters also makes changes to privacy and separation.

Don’t forget that we’re always here

Even when you’ve just woken up.

Girls around every corner

Right where you least expect it!

Ever will you have to have emotional control

Even when you feel like a troll.

 

My poor youngest sibling, my younger brother, spent most of his childhood and teenage years being the only guy in a house of seven females (mother included there). Even with pets, we females always outnumbered them!

Now, as an adult, he still lives with more females as he shares an apartment with one of our sisters and a cat who is also a girl. He’s got some backup from our nephews, though, as we have more of them than we have nieces (boys: 7, girls: 3); when it comes to, as my mother calls them her grand-dogs and grand-cats (my brother and his wife can’t have children and so have dogs) we once again have more females than males (girl pets: 6, boy pets: 3).

My younger brother is also the least likely to get angry (I have never seen him truly angry and am kind of afraid of what it would take) and the first to forgive.

This little post was inspired by the Stream of Consciousness prompt for this weekend.

Familiar Stranger

He would find where his sister had hidden her.

He would find her, no matter how well she had been hidden.

Why had she been hidden in the first place? It’s not like he would ever harm her. She was not like their sister who had turned her back on everything and anything they had once believed in.

Why his sister thought she was any better than him just because she had found some kind of princess didn’t mean that the princess would be the right one.

After all, their parents had found a princess who had become a queen and that hadn’t turned out very well for them, had it? No, they had been twisted and become the very thing that they had spent their entire lives fighting against not once, but twice. It was better to not put your faith into any kind of nobility at all. The only thing you should put your faith in was your own family and even then, only if they put all of their faith into you as well.

His sister had made her choice and in doing so had become his enemy.

Healing Love

Hurts amass over time,

I‘d like to think that I more sturdy than most.

Don’t forget that you will always carry

Disaster hiding in plain sight.

Everything has to begin somewhere.

Now will you ignore your scars, or respect them?

 

How is it that you come along

Even when my pains not gone

And hold me safe inside your arms

Letting love heal all my harms.

Even when I shout and cry

Really you are my favorite guy.

 

She wasn’t quite sure how to feel so she just sat there, tears streaming silently down her face. The ring that had held a place of pride on her hand now sat in her hand, the cold of the metal seeming to dull the gem that had previously shined in delight.

The door to her room opened and the pitter-patter of feet moving softly over the carpet came to a halt by her bedside. A plate was placed gently on the end table and the bed dipped as an arm came up and around her shoulders.

She said nothing as a hand gently guided her face onto a stronger shoulder and she cried out her sorrows on the shoulder of her brother.

The pie on the plate sat a silent testament to how well he knew her heart.

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Both parts inspired in equal parts from Light and Shade Challenge from yesterday and the Dungeon Prompt from last Thursday.

Yearning

Mary had always wanted a child, someone to raise and watch and know that they were hers. She’d wanted a husband to stand next to her while she cradled their  young, his arm around her shoulders as the baby slept in her arms.

For most of her life, there hadn’t been anyone she’d wanted. most of her life was spent keeping her sister out of trouble and trying to find whatever it was they were looking for.

(It had taken too long, much too long, to find their purpose, but they hadn’t realized how long it was for the first millennium or so.)

Once they’d found their purpose, their princess, they hadn’t thought much beyond keeping her alive and then helping her and others of her ‘class’ (for lack of a better word) to do what they needed to do. They’d protected their princess and any others where and when necessary, but other than their duty and the few small friendships that had come with said duty…

Mary hadn’t started wanting, really wanting, what their princess, what the others had until after their princess, now their Queen, had given birth to her third child.

Watching Solaris with her two elder children around her, her husband standing behind her as they presented their third child to the Court had changed something within Mary’s heart.

Mary’s sister hadn’t felt that change for herself, but considering how they’d been connected at the time, she’d felt it in Mary. Star hadn’t understood, but Mary hadn’t blamed her.

For all that they were one at one point-

(Before Mother had split them, made them separate but the same.)

-they were very different by this point.

Her desires didn’t mean Mary wanted to leave her duty behind and considering the time shortly after the Third Child of Sol was presented…

Well, after the War no one thought Mary’d be able to do anything.

But Star had remembered and out of everyone else, she was the only one who knew that time didn’t matter when it came to finding a solution for Mary. And she had.

But all of Star’s work and planning and actions hadn’t been able to get her sister everything Mary had wanted. Mary had mental stability and health now and with time, she’d found Warren.

But they couldn’t have children.

And so Mary had continued to yearn for that thing she could never have.

She still loved Warren-

(Would always love her Bonded.)

-but she also mourned that they could never have children.

Once she realized that Warren was just as aware of her mourning as Star had been of her wish for a family, she’d been terrified that it was too much for him. Warren was one of a kind, but surely even he had to have his limits.

But…

Warren had just pulled her into his arms, laid his face against her hair and cried with her.

It hadn’t ruined their marriage and the mourning in the back of their hearts had faded enough into the background that it was more a watercolor on a fantastic high definition snapshot of a meteor shower. There and always present, but not the focus and not the point of the picture.

Warren wouldn’t let it ruin what he had with his wife. He had wanted children just as much as she had and they would find a way to have children. If it took twenty years to get approved for adoption or fostering he would go through that.

(They would have gone through it together and loved any and every child put under their care.)

It didn’t turn out that way, but they would have taken more children into their home if they could have. They’d even been preparing themselves to go to Mary’s brother, Alex and ask for help.

(Alex would have helped in a heartbeat, sooner even.)

They hadn’t needed to.

It was around the flu season when they noticed something different. About a month directly after Warren had gone in for his own flu shot, specifically.

(Even with what she was sealed away, Mary didn’t really need the same shots that others did. She’d gotten the boosters needed for an immunization record, of course, but flu shots weren’t mandatory and so she skipped them.)

It started slowly-

(As slowly as anything but faster than some, it’s different for every person after all.)

-but Mary started to show signs of something different about her. Something that she had noticed about thousands of others throughout her very long life, but had never personally experienced. A small part of her had been terrified when she told her husband.

(What would he say? What would he do?)

She needn’t have worried.

They ended up going to see Alex after all and it was he who found out what had been done to Warren and what this meant for them.

(Mary would wait over two decades to thank the woman responsible.)

Blood Type

Cary sighed and flopped down onto her bed dramatically. Her parents were probably the worst parents in the history of lame parents.

(Yes, she was exaggerating. Yes, she was aware of it. No, she wasn’t going to stop.)

They weren’t going to answer her questions. They weren’t even going to acknowledge that she had questions and that they would have to answer them at some point.

(They were likely to actually go to their graves holding onto this secret, she suspected. It seemed to be that kind of secret and it was driving her nuts.)

It had started with a simple Biology assignment for school. They were learning about genetics and how they affect blood types within the family. Her parents were both Type O and she was Type AB. She looked like her parents and she was fairly certain that her mother hadn’t cheated on her father.

(They just didn’t have that vibe and what prodding she’d done had shown up as her parents being completely faithful to one another. And that they were both very aware that she apparently wasn’t theirs,thank you very much.)

Their manner towards her had never been any different from the way they treated her younger brother.

(Who was their biological child. She’d been there when her parents had explained why Mommy’s tummy was getting bigger and why she was going to have a younger brother. That had been a very traumatic thing to realize when she’d first gone through puberty and realized just what her parents would have to have done in order for her younger brother to be there at all.)

“This is going to bug me until the day I die if I don’t figure it out,” she mumbled to herself.