Roots

It started with Cool Whip and ended with Greek yogurt.

Greg and I flew to Colorado to attend a Denver Broncos game and I squeezed in an afternoon with Rat. Rat is the baby of my family, born one wintery morning while I was at 4th grade recess. She looked like a Precious Moments doll until she hit junior high and then morphed into a model overnight. Naturally blonde, acneless, and master of self tanner. I'd hate her if I didn't love her so much.

For our sister date she made me a turkey sandwich with microgreens and grainy mustard. She hacked a few pluots to death and let me finish off her bag of 60% Ghiradelli chips. She talked like Oscar the Grouch and Gollum while we mocked SYTYCD. She showed me how to snap aspagarus. I discovered that we both suffer from an addiction to kitchen towels and finishing salts. I blew her mind with Dior Nail Glow. The activity that warmed my heart the best was our Cool Whip taste test.

Durkoviches love Cool Whip. Don't get me wrong, we also love real whipped cream, but Cool Whip is the nonfood our childhood dreams are whipped of. (Probably the same way my father-in-law loves Spam and my own dad loves orange dreamsicle...it's all related to childhood.) All Durko kids loved eating chocolate pudding+graham cracker+Cool Whip parfaits in the Tupperware glasses on family night.

Rat promised to have Snack Pack puddings and Cool Whip when I came to visit. Her husband purchased both lite and extra creamy varieties for us to choose from. We were befuddled as to which was better. Rat busted out all of her demitasse spoons and we were given a blind taste test to see if we could decipher which was which, being lifelong Cool Whip experts and all. We were both wrong, Greg wouldn't play, and Rat's husband who prefers ice cream called it perfectly.

As I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs that night I couldn't get over how good a sibling is for the soul. Siblings are connected deep in their roots, but sometimes those roots get covered and overlooked by the adult hustle of stayin' alive. (Travolta reference for Suz)

Today is the first official day of fall. The scrub oaks on Mount Timpanogos are signaling that the time has indeed come. Missouri maples could whoop Utah scrub oaks any day of the week as far as autumn beauty goes but scrubs are all I've got so I'll take 'em. Somehow today's crisp breeze combined with the Cool Whip incident rekindled my love and appreciation for my siblings.

What I wouldn't give to be under the same roof as my siblings again, especially during a Missouri autumn. I know exactly what we would be doing.

We would be sorting the edge from the middle pieces of the circular rabbit puzzle while Dad kneeled at the hearth crinkling pages from the Tribune for the season's first fire. He'd strike a long match on the bottom of the brass cup and maybe light the chimney on fire with a Little Caesar's pizza box. (true story)

We would be eating leaf-shaped biscuits with gravy on Saturday morning and then we'd go outside and help Dad rake up the fallen leaves...all 99 bags of them. Dad would blow our hair with the leaf blower and multiple piles would be depleted by jumping contests. There would be mom's turkey bone soup simmering on the range and fried biscuits and Suzette's customary birthday pumpkin pie. Yes, there would be Cool Whip on the pie.

We would be playing board games on the blue shag carpet in the basement while Dad roared to college football on the tiny TV by the buck stove. We would be sitting on the landing of the stairs under the giant, fuzzy jack-o-lantern trading our Halloween candy and taking advantage of young Rat, who was too dumb to know that all of her Kit Kats weren't worth two packs of Sweet Tarts. We would eat candy corns from the crystal bowl and resist the urge to pull the pepper noses off of mom's scarecrow decorations. We would be making baby pies in TV dinner tins with the leftover crust Mom gave us on Thanksgiving Eve. We would pedal fast down our driveway's hill and glide through swirling leaves in our magical Woodridge neighborhood.

Oh, did I appreciate it when I lived it?

Today I opened a new Greek yogurt. RE and I played tic-tac-toe on its pristine, unbroken surface. The game was a "cat" since RE is every bit my mental equal. Nearly the moment the game was over my heart was swelling from missing my siblings. We always played tic-tac-toe on the top of any food that would let us...a new jar of peanut butter, a new box of ice cream, a new tub of sour cream or Parkay, you name it. We never squandered the opportunity to play in our food.

Suz, Cristall, Matt and Rat,

Do you want to come over and play like we did when we were kids? We can wear Izod shirts and do underdogs on the rope swing. We can do around-the-world in Dad's Mexican hammocks and pull the curl out of Jingles' tail. We can play hide-and-seek behind the trees in our huge yard. We can climb Paul's tree and snag our clothes on the forsythias by Becky Cox's fence. We can set and unload together and do a 2-minute drill. We can make a bed with all the cushions for a Friday night campout. We can eat Little Debbies and sneak into each other's rooms after bedtime. And Suz will be the banker for every board game.

Just let me know when you can get here.

Love,

Wass the Tattletale Picky Eater