You are my history

This weekend was a grab bag of strange and true happenings at Chez Ragged. Thunderstorms, missing cats and kittens, sleeping beloveds and general dissaray. (If you ever want to strike fear in my heart, crank up the tornado sirens while I am stuck in traffic attempting to make my way home. I was completely angst ridden and driving as if I was involved in a police chase.)

Not only did we battle the beast that is our wet basement, but I also spent nearly three hours involved in a different kind of struggle: one with ghosts of the past. And we all know how afraid I am of things that go bump in the night, particularly if they are related to me.

Saturday, my brother and I ended up in a late-night, marathon conversation via phone. It's true that most adult siblings don't necessarily talk into the wee hours of the morning, but lately this seems to be our pattern. Our timing has never quite been right.

You see, Prince P and I are coming back around, a full circle of sorts. For some time we had been a bit estranged. Not estranged as in "I hate you. Never speak to me again. I want to smack you with my glass of iced tea." More like, "There's this awful tension and I'd rather twist myself up in knots than fight with you. Pass the ketchup."

We were never really able to pinpoint the source of our division, but not long ago I started realizing how affected I was by the remarks and biases of others when it came to him. For some reason I was able to dismiss this sort of thing when it came to anyone else, willing to give everyone a chance, but with him it was different and I cannot tell you why that was so.

He too suffered from listening to one too many "You aren't going to believe what she did now" stories. It had kind of soured us on one another. It's much more complicated than that, the way we let others steer our relationships, but let's try to keep it as simple as possible. Life can be complicated enough between tense conversations over cold turkey, glaring looks during church services and personal jabs during Scrabble.

Once you take the meddlers and manipulators out of the equation, you can often see each other for who he or she is. Sometimes it's as if you are looking at each other for the first time. Sometimes it's as if you are seeing them as a person, someone separate from all of the history, real, imagined or created.

That's how it is now. I see him for him. Not who he was. Not in the way they see him. Not who I wanted him to be. He's my brother, he's a painter, he's a father, he's a friend, he's a mate.

Siblings are something of a different kind of relative. You shared the same dinner table, sometimes the same room, the same parents and the same history, but each of you have a different take, a different amount of information and a different recollection of sorts. It's amazing to me that each of us have a different version of the stories of our collective past. We each held on to memories that maybe the others didn't, processing and translating them in our own way through the years and moments since.

In each of our conversations I learn something about us that I never realized, never saw or maybe never even knew. That's good in many ways, to view your past through someone else's eyes, but it's also a little scary, digging up those ghosts and tackling them once and for all. I've always been afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. And sometimes the light is shown upon something you weren't prepared to hear, ready to handle or equipped to react to.

The conversations may be long, they may be difficult. It's slow going, it's baby step after baby step. It's stumbling in the dark. But it's worth all of the bumps and bruises. I know that it's all about meeting each other all over again. It's a reintroduction to someone you knew all too well.

As irony would have it, I watched "Brothers and Sisters" last night. Who isn't in that show?

Above is a shot of another felted bowl.