Light of My Life

The bicentennial year was one that I have several distinct memories of.  It was the year I turned 13.  There was the most horrible drought through the plains; I remember the crops mostly at the South Dakota farm, where the oats grew only about 3 inches tall.  Everything, everywhere, seemed to be wrapped, draped, or painted in red, white, and blue.  But the most powerful color I saw that year was pink:  the pink of the dress my newborn sister Sheri came home in, one week after her birth on March 29th. 

She was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on.  She had the roundest blue eyes and the most transparent skin, and I worshipped her instantly.  I don't remember Mom ever having to tell me to take care of her, although she must have.  What I do recall is going to her first thing every day when I came home from school and seeing her eyes light up when I picked her up, giving me little bubbles of joy where I imagined my heart to be.   Feeding, diapering, bathing her---none of these seemed like chores, because I could laugh and be easy with her in a way that I found impossible as a shy, painfully awkward teenager.  It's not too much to say that she helped me grow a heart; I still feel those same bubbles there---tearing up a little, even now---when I picture her in her little infant rocker, sitting next to the piano as I practiced my lessons, cooing along to the music with her chin raised, her tiny lips forming a perfectly round O.   No happiness for me this side of heaven could possibly be more pure than that picture, two sisters adoring each other and making music together for the sheer joy of it.

She grew so fast into one of the most distinctive characters in our family---and that's saying a lot.  When she was still tiny, Dad christened her "Sharo" because when she would see that cheesy 70's performer Charro doing her shake-it-and-squeal routine on TV, Sheri would try to imitate her.  (How I wish we had THAT on video to prove it to her.)  By the time she was a toddler, she was infamous for hating to have clothes on.  She would abide them in public because Mom wouldn't have her babies looking trashy by running around without clothing, but as soon as she came in the back door, she would start stripping everything off, right down to slipping out of her diaper when she could manage it.  Sometimes I think she might have done it just for the reaction; because she was so much different from my brother and me, who had both been fairly tame, docile children, we were all just a little bit shocked by her exuberance.  She was a wild child---loud, laughing, irrepressible, with limitless energy and no fear.  Mom tells a story about working in the kitchen one afternoon while Sheri, two or three at the time, was playing in the back yard , and when Mom went over to the kitchen sink to clean up, she looked out to find Sheri standing in the pasture right in the middle of a herd of mama cows and, if I remember, a few calves.  Anyone who has ever worked with cattle knows the most dangerous ones are mama cows, but they paid her almost no attention.  Another time, when Sheri was around four, Mom caught her rolling a hay bale over and over, back and forth, in the yard---it had to be close to twice her weight.  By that time, we all knew that no force on earth was going to keep her from doing what she thought she needed to do. 

Still, we had our bond through those years.  When she was still little enough for her bottle, I would sometimes take her to bed with me at night, laying out a row of pillows on the other side to protect her; when Mom went to bed, she'd put her in her crib for the night.  I remember coming home from school one day when she was still a toddler, and for the first time, she didn't greet me at the door and jump into my arms.  Mom said she had been sick all day; I found her lying on the love seat as limp as a wilted daisy.  To see her so hurt me in a way I didn't know possible.  It's the same look she still gets when she's sick---and it hurts me no less today.  She would break my heart every Christmas, crying at "Rudolph" because the other reindeer kids wouldn't play with him....but it would drive me nuts that she would watch The Price is Right and scream with joy when people won, and cry when they lost.  But never was she not fun to me.  I can't count the number of articles of clothing I sewed for her in my four years of home-ec, including little halter dresses that were popular at the time that she now calls "hooker dresses."  We didn't cut her hair until she was seven, and I was constantly toying with it, putting it up in "tails," as she called them.  By the time I graduated from high school, Sheri was a rangy five-year-old who was ready to take on the world. 

The years after I left home seemed to go by so fast, and after Sheri's third-grade year, when our brother graduated, she mostly grew up like an only child.  I missed so much of what happened in those years, but she became exactly who she was destined to be.  Before I knew what was happening, she was in high school.  The gangly little girl became a gorgeous young woman; that translucent skin and those round blue eyes served her well.  She was a handful, no doubt, but probably no more so than most teenagers---she was just bursting with so much more energy and emotion than Bo and I had at that age that I think Mom and Dad felt overwhelmed by it at times.  Still, she was and is the child that has kept them young into their 70s.  Through her college years and up until she was 30, she lived out in OKC in a world that was alien to all of us:  producing television news, managing a restaurant, opening new stores in Texas and Oklahoma for a jewelry chain, selling Pampered Chef and Mary Kay, almost always working two or even three jobs at a time.  We all knew hard work, but she was and is one of the hardest-working people I will ever know.   I worried about her leaving behind her life there when, at 30, she honored Dad's request that she come back to the ranch and run the place because it was getting to be too much for him.  Instead, she found her life there, meeting her future husband on a trip to Texas, marrying him in 2009, and at long last having the children she longed for, with a now 10-year-old sweet step-daughter and 19-month-old spitfire daughter who is every inch of her personality, carbon copied and magnified for effect. 

When I saw Allie in the hospital after Sheri gave birth, my first words were, "Oh, she looks so much like Katie!"---our brother's little girl, with the same round, blue Welker eyes and milky skin.  I think I must have slipped sideways in time, for, after reflecting on it, I find....that little girl looked so much like her mother, the baby girl who taught me the meaning of "the light of my life."  Watching her now, with her own family, I know that she, too, has felt that great gift, and I am so blessed to see it coming back around again, 37 years after she was gifted to us.