Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Generosity

I have two families - an even dozen brothers, an older sister, my parents, and Aunt Cindy and Uncle Rob.



"Hey kids! Get your coats on, you're going up the Hill to play for the afternoon!" Mom called out from the kitchen. All over the house, books were set down and kids flew downstairs. We put our boots and coats on in almost record time and Josiah bundled Elias into his snowsuit. We were ready in no more than five minutes. Mom got her coat on and we all went out to the suburban.

We spent the entire afternoon playing in the bunk room with the younger Sawyer boys, except for Tom who was in bed sick.

I found out later that it was just another instance of our two families sharing things, a common occurrence.



We helped them with haying one year when I was six, working until the ungodly hour of 10pm to load loose hay into the fifth wheel trailer and get it covered before the thunderstorm.

They gave us 7 cats over a ten year period, and there were almost always kittens up the Hill to play with. Prolific barn cats, there are probably Pinnacle cats in half the town.

Whenever my parents went somewhere and needed someone to watch us kids, Hannah came down with her Mary Poppins bag and often a younger brother or three; or we went up there to amuse ourselves under each other's watchful eye.

Our train set bin was used to create grand feats of engineering, such as running track up to the second bunk on the bunk beds. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed that so many times, but we did. We also ran tracks through the entire upstairs, which was not mean feat.

Caleb 'adopted' me as his baby sister when I was a year old, and he still keeps half an eye on me. (As do the younger boys, it's the result of being the only girl in our age group. Also the result of being the klutsiest person in said group.)

Now, in my teen years, I cook for an extra person at every meal, because it is so common for one of the three 'little' boys to randomly show up. Birthday parties at our house often have company, and we can throw together a movie night in ten minutes.

It is still rather common to go places with the boys and get mistaken for being siblings, and we just smile and nod and go about this business of life.

It no longer surprises me to find one or another downstairs reading or stacking wood or playing with the dogs or outside sword fighting my brothers. I keep a couple extra blankets on hand in case one of our movie nights goes quite late and someone needs to crash on the couch. And when the car died a couple weeks ago, we called up the Hill for one of the boys to come down and jump it.



As for the afternoon we went up the Hill? Oh, the boys had the chicken pox and Josiah had been exposed the night before so Mom wanted us to all get good and sick so she only had to deal with it once.

Like I said, we share most things.

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