We were born in West Virginia...


Looking at the recent roll of film I got developed, my dad said:
"you guys were in rare form on this trip. I mean you were really hilarious, that's when you were writing the poetry, wasn't it?"
It's true. The trip we took to Louisville after my sister graduated from college was one of those perfect things. Timed when we were all on the same page--happy to see each other, missing being apart. All four kids in a state of "comedic commraderie," egged on by the fact our parents were laughing so hard my dad almost wrecked the car.
One photo shows my youngest sister with a crescent shaped neck pillow around the top of her head, hands in a jazz-fingers pose. She is screaming something about her dutch hat and wooden shoes. "I don't know any Dutch words, Schnecken, schnecken, strudel. Strudel, strudel, strudel," she screams in a high-pitched doll's voice.
Our brother: one shows him wearing a lampshade hat, another depicts him doing a Napoleon Dynamite dance.
Another photograph has me, and the other sister, gold foil teeth applied to happy grins.
Happy times.
Later, I will get a poem we wrote to post for everyone. We did the thing where you each write one line, fold the paper over, then pass it on. No one knows what anyone else wrote, then you read it and see what you get. Some of them were eerily well-done.
Anyway, our dad is strangely proud that his kids turned out to be weird-o commedians instead of bankers or lawyers.

"Strudel" to your sisters at janeh928@yahoo.com