Sisterly healing

My sisters are here… Helen has been consigned to the little fold-out sofa-bed… and Anita is queen bee and got the guest/craft room. They showed up yesterday, spent most of the day cajoling Satan, and then came home to catch some Zs before their extensive shopping excursion today. My husband has been hubby-napped as I work; he’s been stolen to be used for furniture assembly and shopping bag portage; they will be hitting IKEA to get the rest of my mother’s furniture. You see, my mother hardly brought anything. One bed (?), two wing-back chairs, a coffee table with a broken marble top, a sideboard buffet, a small table, a smaller table, two cart thingies, four chairs and that’s it. $4,000 to ship that crap. We could have replaced all of that and then some… But hey… it’s Satan, what can we expect… Evil. Impractical evil.

Oh well… to IKEA they go. I’m curious to see what comes of it.

Daddy is resting in ashes on my sideboard in a cheap laminate box. I had a meltdown yesterday seeing him there. It’s just wrong to imagine that the whole of the person you once loved is reduced to ashes and put into a box. Incredibly wrong. I seem to be taking it the worst of all of us. My sisters are quite mellow and unemotional at the moment. In fact, it's been good that they are because I need some evenness around me. We had a chuckle or two since they got here… yes, it’s a subdued situation, but it is also important to laugh--and in our family, laughter has always been the primary survival tactic.

About eight years ago, my mother sent both my sister Anita and I a little resin dollar store Easter bunny figurine. It’s the cheesiest, tackiest piece of junk in the world. It’s along these lines in tackyness:

The one time my mother actually extended herself to send gifts, this is what she came up with. It had a little glitter ball on it, a white rabbit and inside the glitter ball a bee sat on resin flowers. Anita and I graciously thanked her for her treasures… and then the pranking began. We both tried to get rid of the bunny by giving them to each other at weird times. I was living with Nee then, so whenever she traveled (which she did a lot while I lived in her home), I would sneak the resin bunnies into her suitcases. I’d then get the inevitable phone-call about it from wherever she was, and she’d be giggling. Then she’d sneak it under my pillow, and when I moved, she snuck them into my packing boxes. When she moved to New York, we packed them into her stuff. She mailed them back with a care package; I mailed them to her with Christmas gifts… and so on. The bunnies (one disappeared) have seen more miles than your average person and has crossed this country so many times in eight years, I can't even keep track. The last time the bunny traveled, it came back to Oregon from Pensacola in a package with some shoes my sister sent me. The glitter-ball had shattered, and one ear was broken off. So over these past weeks, I’ve been carefully cleaning it of broken glass, and Tuesday night, I tucked it under my sister’s pillow.

Last night at bed-time, my smug face made her suspicious, and she found it, and called me names. We laughed about it heartily while Helen shouted for us to quiet down from the living room. Poor Dan is exposed to this abject silliness… but it is so therapeutic.

Now I need to get ‘hold of it before she does so I can cram it somewhere in her suitcase. The bunneh needs to go back to its rightful home.

In the meantime, I'm resolved to get back to normal blogging and to stop being such a Debbie Downer. Tonight I'm going to make my mother's infamous fried chicken. It's a fried chicken I have yet to see anyone else make.. no batter. I will try to blog it if I remember, along with some shots of my crazy sisters. :) I do wish sometimes we could all get together for something that *isn't* sad or obligatory... I wish I could just hang out with them for once without some crisis keeping us distracted. ::sigh:: I'm jealous that my hubby is with them at IKEA while I'm sitting here at a video store and coffee shop blogging while scarfing a burger. :( Boooo.

I made an office special today. It's rough, but I did it very quickly, sketched and inked in about fifteen minutes while I waited for our IT dept to call me. I coloured it w/photoshop on my little baby computer with simple select and opacity-layering... very fast. Anyway... it's a picture of sisters. And a dog. :)