Dad's Attic Potpourri - Big Finish

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Catch up before we conclude. Click the text for Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Outside, we replaced our bouquets of moldy attic flowers with handfuls of puffy dandelions, violets, and wild strawberries. We stuffed red dogwood berries into the gaps of pinecones to be sold at our make-believe market alongside home-made mudpies. We threw the dollies and ourselves into the hammock and thrashed about wildly, buffeted by imaginary storms on invisible seas. We gave her mom mini-heart attacks, shrieking as the hoards of tent caterpillars hidden in the grass squished their guts between our bare toes. We were high on life, but we still craved danger...and height. Being genetically-doomed to shortness does that to a person.

So we took to the trees. Finally, her mom could worry about broken bones again, thereby keeping her own infrastructure intact. The saucer magnolias lured us first with their skinny, bendy trunks and tulip-like blooms. We had a mission: pick the highest flowers on the “tulip tree”! We shimmied up like the little monkeys that we were and quickly discovered that just like the drawstring of the attic door, the branches could be swung from and pulled down – easy picking, but hardly high adventure on the open trees. Still, these twiggy trees had some give to them, so we decided find limbs to serve as chaise lounges so we could recline like the ladies of luxury we were with our new-found natural wealth.

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CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)],
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To this day, Leah remains slightly taller and loads leaner, and I remain...stocky. Just as in our weekly gymnastics classes on the uneven bars, she used grace and planning to maneuver, while I clumsily muscled my way through. Because I was stronger, I was faster and reached the longest, flattest twig of branch first, a whole five feet in the air, and claimed it proudly as my own. I sprawled out on my stomach, legs wrapped around the limb, chin resting on my intertwined fingers and beamed smugly at Leah, who was still daintily ascending. I was first, I was high queen, and so I surveyed the backyard from my perch and prepared to lay claim to the best parts before she could catch up. Crrrr-ACK! Body-slam! High queen to bloody peasant groveling in the dirt at terminal velocity. Deeply concerned, Leah burst out into uncontrollable giggling that quickly deteriorated into a fit of silent convulsions and intermittent snorting that almost brought her down to the ground too. Besides being my best friend, Leah was also my cousin – laughing at injured people was as hereditary as our being vertically-challenged. She was doing the family proud.

We stumbled into the kitchen. Fortunately Al was preoccupied and thus unavailable to douse me with peroxide. I was scraped, bruised, and had twigs and grass stuck in my hair. Leah gurgled and spurted incoherent phrases in between gasps trying to explain the painful hilarity she'd just witnessed. I had a puffy lip and pouted for my injured pride; Leah's face was streaked with hysterical tears. Her mom looked back and forth between us trying to discern which of us was more severely impaired...and then a little twitter escaped Thalia's pursed lips. It was too late – there was no catching it and stuffing it back in – the chirp took hold of her, dissolving all her composure into a chortling, cackling puddle of laughter wiping her eyes on the kitchen floor.

A few years later, Leah and I and even her little brother Noodle would take to climbing the 50-foot white pine in the backyard to escape her parents' arguments. Just like Al,  we would sit there high, quiet, and reflective, staring out at the neon-red EAT sign off the parkway exit ramp, at the Smith's adopted children playing in their above-ground pool, at our golden retriever stealing tomatoes from the neighborhood garden. High above her family's chimney on our much sturdier and sap-stickier branches, had we been up there on the right night, waiting in the dark for the first star to appear as we often did, we could have watched and smelled as $1,000-worth of home-grown potpourri literally went up in smoke after Thalia left Al and he feared she'd narc him out for attic-farming in a residential zone.

I like to imagine that the neighbors all got their dogs drunk on rice wine and laughed and smiled and hugged each other that night. That Al's anti-anger elixir, billowing on the winds, spread his genius and cured his inner loneliness for awhile. That somewhere Thalia unknowingly breathed it in, being filled with the peace of something cared for with her husband's unconditional love. Leah now burns the occasional incense. Noodle went through a stint snorting crushed Xanex tablets. I stick to candles, psychologists, and SSRIs. Thalia and Al eventually got back together – a marriage of business and comfort in the devil you know.

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But there was no arguing the night of our kitchen cackling club. That night Al, feeling amiable after his aromatherapy, bounced up the basement stairwell carrying a plastic two-liter of the rice wine he'd bottled last year and forgotten. Normally, not in an altered state, he would have raged at our noise interrupting his television shows. Instead, eager to join the ruckus, he nearly tripped on the giggling, wriggling pile of the three of us upon his enthusiastic re-entry to the lit world. He chuckled benevolently, smiled, and then turned suddenly serious, saying, “Girls, we're different from other people. My brother once told me 'Al – they can't see the things you can see.' And he's right. They can't. Remember that – we're not like everyone else...Shit! I spilled the rice wine. Look! The dog's licking it up. Whaddaya say we give him a treat and see if he wants to get drunk?”

Soon, Thalia was cooking in the kitchen with a smile on her face, while we sat in bean bag chairs in the living room on the rose-patterned, pink-and-black velvet carpet laughing as their golden retriever staggered between us, nearly falling on us as he licked us with love.

And that's why our family never suffocated. Amidst secrets, non-traditional treasures lost and found, Al's uneven temper, Thalia's silent suffering, and our mutual misunderstandings, every so often something lighter floated on the air. Laughing so hard we had no choice but to breathe in love.

The End

(Yeah, I got all sappy on ya. You shoulda seen it coming though.)