1:08 p.m. - 2006-01-15
It's all just stuff.

Family Dynamics

If I had to paint one picture of my childhood it would be this one.

We are in the backyard of our simple 3 bedroom ranch in a fairly young suburb. The house is a 6 year old brown frame ranch with the lower portion in a tannish brown brick. It is 1965.

We live in a subdivision and the houses are close together. The yard is featurless save a small maple tree, a little log cabin playhouse, a play rocking horse attached to a frame with springs, and a 2 foot high, yellow sided swimming pool about 6' in diameter.

It looks like all the other backyards on the block.

There are about 6 neighborhood kids in the yard of mixed gender and all the girls are in one piece bathing suits.

The pool is empty except for my sister Linda who is slowly swiming around the pool while the rest of us look on. She is about 6 years old and every so often we are all forced out of the pool so Linda can have it to herself for 15 minutes because she can't stand to get splashed. We still tease her about this today...40 years later. We will never let her forget it.

Mom is in the house with 3 year old Diane who is a bundle of energy. Mom is dressing Diane after a morning in the pool. She turned her back after taking off Diane's bathing suit and in reaching for her clothes, the toddler escaped.

Out in the yard, we were starting to get antsy watching Linda play queen of the pool, slowly swimming around, keeping her head up so not a drop of water touched her face, when the back door swung open and out flew a naked little piggy with a mischievious look on her face. She flew past the other kids and made a beeline for the spring horse....mounting it and rocking back and forth with gusto.

A few minutes later, Mom came flying out with a towel. Diane saw her coming and in one leap jumped off the horse, rounded the side of the house and headed for the sidewalk, flying down the block like the wind, naked as a jaybird, Mom running behind.

We are a normal family. We had good, white bread, suburban upbringing. We had normal, hard working parents. We were taught right from wrong and how to behave civilized. But somewhere along the line...even in the best of families, wrongs are wronged and hurts are perpetrated on each other. Jealousy starts to grow and baggage starts to accumulate. We can say we grow up and we can say we put things behind us but do we really?

That baggage is always there. It is like the proverbial elephant in the middle of the living room. We all know it's there but no one will acknowledge it. We choose to hang onto that baggage. Once in a while a couple of those bags will get open and one sibling will toss a piece of dirty underwear at the other. Then another piece gets tossed back. In the end, the dirty underwear is gathered and stuffed back into the bag, but it gets dirtier while it is out.

This all becomes even worse when a parent passes away and the booty of their lives must be divided up. No matter how the deceased life is divided, the STUFF just becomes a platform to work out all the anger built up over the years.

Spiritual suitcases can become over loaded just like physical. If it get's overloaded the baggage, bursts at the seams and comes undone.

All over STUFF.

What a shame.

P. I. Yarnsmith

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