holiday

I dust twice a year, Easter and Christmas, these are the days large amounts of people visit my house hoping to find chip dip and liquor.  I am not good at entertaining, nothing about it appeals to me and I am glad when the last citizen leaves my house.  I see people leaving my bathroom with dripping hands and my granddaughter Cameron is running up the stairs.  She is nude and there's my bathroom guest towel  wrapped around her little waist and she announces to the group she will be taking a shower. At least we got her out of her bathing suit which she has taken to wearing all the time.  You do not negotiate with a three-year-old child.

My brother David and I sit on our folding chairs holding our beer cans and waiting for the clock hands to move.  We are both self-acknowledged hermits and we come to these events because we know that family connections matter  although we're not sure why. We are waiting to return to our solitary comfortable lifestyles.

Another brother, Mark, is sitting on my purple couch and drinking my orange juice.  He is the middle sibling and owner of all the troubles and quirks that middle children are said to possess. "Poor Mark," my mother would sigh and roll her eyes," he is the middle child, you know," and with that statement he garnished a large portion of her attention.  And it didn't help that we teased him relentlessly about his "Dumbo" ears when we were small and he retaliated and called me "pizza face," an unchecked acne condition was my teen-aged angst.  Funny, the rest of him  caught up with those ears and they do not appear overly large to me at this late date. Mark did attain adulthood with only a few harmless neuroses, just like the rest us.
Another holiday passes and I hand my sister-in-law a pot of daffodils for volunteering to make the painstaking, time-consuming peanut cake recipe that is our family's mainstay traditional Easter dessert.  It involves freezing chunks of  cake and frosting all six sides of the chunks and rolling them in smashed peanuts.  It is not for the weak of heart but Sheri has met that challenge when she married my brother, a middle child with noticeable ears.