Summers With My Siblings
Barbie ❤️ Wolverine: My brother loved the X-Men and would sometimes bring his Wolverine and Beast action figures to join our Barbies on their adventures.
Cards and Coins: My brother was a baseball card and coin collector, and one of his most successful schemes was convincing his adoring little sister (me) to join him in his hobby. He traded me all his low-value cards for my high-value cards and I was none the wiser until my dad caught him and made him give them back.
Devil Rock: Every summer, my family took a trip to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin. There are numerous attractions within the park that have ‘Devil’ in the name and one that has ‘Rock’ in the name. When we were really little, we were staying in a cabin and my parents had their backs turned to my sister. She somehow managed to turn on a stove burner and lit a curtain near the stove on fire. When my very startled parents turned around, my toddler sister told them, “Name me ‘Rock’. ‘Devil Rock’.”
Playing With Mom’s Makeup: My sister and I loved to play with our mom’s makeup. She had a beautiful raspberry pink Revlon nail polish that had a purply blue shimmer that we were both obsessed with. This one is my attempt to dupe the vibe!
Potholes Trail: At Devil’s Lake, the Potholes Trail is a steep stone staircase climb up the side of a bluff. We did the trail every year (sometimes with my dad carrying my little sister on his shoulders when she got tired), and I have fond memories of all the very dramatic complaining we did every year on the ascent.
Riding Sleeping Bags Down the Stairs: Each of the three of us had a Disney sleeping bag with a slippery outer texture. One day, we decided to get into our sleeping bags and ride them down the staircase. We would slide down as fast as we could while vocalizing so that every time our butts hit the next step, the sound we made would change.
Sam’s Candy Tab: In our late childhood/early tween years, my sister was such a frequent visitor to a mom-and-pop convenience store near our house that they let her run up a tab for her candy purchases. They knew she’d be back and they knew she was good for it!
Saturday Cartoons: I have so many fond memories of watching the X-Men and other Saturday morning cartoons with my brother and sister.
Sure, Bert: Introducing the joke my sister and I thought was the most hilarious thing in the world when we were little. Our grandma pronounces sherbet as “sherbert”. She usually had rainbow sherbet for us when we came to visit. Every time we were getting ready to scoop a bowl of sherbet, my sister and I would turn to each other and ask, “Do you want some sherbet, Ernie?”, to which the answer was always, “Sure, Bert”. We cracked ourselves up every time.
Swapping Barbie Heads and Bodies: Sam and I had a few treasured Gymnast Barbies with flexible joints, but our Barbies with the prettiest faces had non-flexible bodies, so we gently wedged their heads off and put them on the Gymnast Barbie bodies. We were constantly swapping around heads and bodies.
Top Bunk, Middle Bunk, and Trundle Bed: For the first ten years of my life, I shared a bedroom with my siblings. My brother had the top bunk, I had the middle bunk, and my sister had the trundle bed. I remember so many afternoons of play and ridiculous hijinks in our bedroom.
Upside Down Bicycle Ice Cream: When I told my sister that I was working on this collection, I asked her if she had any childhood memories she’d like me to include. She immediately mentioned the days when we would flip our bicycles upside down on the front lawn and spin the pedals and pretend that we were churning ice cream.