Member-only story
The circumstances of our birth are not something over which we have control.
That may be just as well, as, despite the fact some of us may have made another preference with regard to where we are in the birth order, where and to whom we were born, upon further reflection maybe we wouldn’t have decided better than what happened without our input.
My sibship happens to be fairly large: I have five sibs, all older.
We happen to meet several times a month via Zoom, which one of my sisters and her husband host. It allows us to keep in touch in a way that exceeds the way we maintained contact before the pandemic. It is, in the words of my dear departed father: “a blessing in disguise.”
This sister is closest to me in age. At one point in high school we took the same science class.
I think we both did well in that class, taught by a kindly farmer who carried with him a slight perpetual whiff of manure. None was to be seen, but it seemed imbedded in his clothing if not his skin.
Bespeckled, with horn-rim eyeglasses and aquiline facial features, he also kept bees. He was purportedly virtually immune to bee stings, of which he’d had many. His wife, on the other hand, was highly sensitive to bee stings, and one more might have proved fatal.
