“I’ve got an announcement to make,” said my sister, waving her bare arms around like Cleopatra. It didn’t help that in honour of her 50th birthday, she was also wearing a white toga dress and a tiara.
The sun was shining, the river behind her regal form, sparkling. Boats and barges splashed by and the kids laughed through the warm air and blue sky.
“I’d like to announce,” she proclaimed, “...that me and Mr Captain Hook are pursuing a relationship.”
Mr Captain Hook, I later discovered, is a real person, somewhere in America; a fellow conspiracy-theorist, and a man she met online, and not, as it turns out, a fictional pirate who lost a hand to a crocodile while being taunted by a flying boy.
“Bravo!” I said loudly, amidst the applause on the riverbank - though not loudly enough to be interpreted. Then I turned to Sammy and remarked on how ‘dramatic’ my sister can be. Sammy smiled back, pleasantly. I wondered what might have happened if we had announced our relationship to the world like that. Later on we both remarked how different me and my three siblings actually are.
This was the first time I’d seen all my family together in this whole season! There were my nephews, tall and thirteen, cackling with secret laughter at all the things thirteen year old boys usually cackle about, before disappearing up the trees that needed to be climbed. There was my other sister, quiet and confident, with relationship news of her own she could never dream of annunciating thank you very much, to the world, at a family picnic. There were the Intrepids in their garden chairs, smiling serenely; the real king and queen of the feast. And there were my aunty and uncle, looking on silently and thoughtfully.
It was all rather like you might picture heaven, but heaven if you were sort of dreaming it. All those months of missing your loved ones, ending with a sunlit reunion on a beautiful day. It seemed like the perfect denouement. After a while, my younger sister arrived, beaming and joyful and stylish as she always is, with her youngest in sun-hat and shorts. A cheer went up, as it should. I wonder sometimes whether we all carry little pieces of heaven with us, and it’s those pieces that light up with joy whenever they recognise another piece. This felt a little bit like that.
We weren’t there for long; perhaps an hour or so. After a while I got too hot and regretted throwing on jeans and a shirt. I had a little overcrowding-anxiety too, which I’ll be honest, took me by surprise. Sammy and I left as politely as possible and walked back to the car in the afternoon sunshine, talking about how great an invention family is. She, thinking about hers, I pondering mine.
I’ve missed that connection with my sisters: the cool one, the quiet one, the controversial one. I’ve missed the being-together that’s been so instrumental in our keeping-it-together.
Picnic blanket under one arm, shadows falling ahead on the grass. I squeezed Sammy’s hand. She squeezed back. And deep inside me, a little piece of joy lit up like Christmas and holidays and birthdays all rolled into one.
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