Day: May 10, 2020

Being the middle sister, I was always the one to share a room. Lara was four years older, and when I was three and a half, Alana was born. We lived in a three-bedroom townhouse, so when baby #3 came along, Lara and I moved in together. My parents got us twin beds, each adorned with matching bedspreads my mom had sewn. Little red and pink flowers ran across them, and an off-white ruffle adorned the edges. It just now occurred to me that she must have sewn these while pregnant and chasing after a three-year-old and tending to a seven-year-old.

We had three new pieces of white furniture: a dresser (Lara claimed the three drawers on the left, so I got the three drawers on the right); a white vanity with a mirror that opened up out of the center; and a tall corner piece with a wide drawer, a small bookshelf, and… wait for it…a secret compartment on each side. I don’t know how we came to call them secret compartments because there was nothing secret about them. They were simply matching sliding panels on either side of the center bookshelf, right there in plain sight. I guess we called them that because we forbade each other to look inside one other’s. What in the world did I keep in there? Pixie sticks? Rocks from the creek? Birds nests?

Lara and I shared that room until the summer before she entered eighth grade, when my parents granted her her own room. She got her very own grown-up furniture; instead of a white vanity and secret compartments, she now had an elegant set of oak. I moved into the bed farther from the door, where I could better stake out a lair, moved my clothes from the right drawers to the left, and made way for Alana.

Throughout my childhood. the Easter Bunny managed to step in paint, not once, not twice, but every single year until I was in middle school (or thereabouts – I can’t remember when he finally thought to look out for that perpetually spilled can of paint). Perhaps the biggest excitement Easter morning was not the baskets filled with chocolate bunnies and jelly beans, but the footprints the bunny would leave out back.

We’d run to the back door, which looked out onto a small wooden back porch and a few stone pavers that led to the back gate, and sure enough: he did it again! That bunny stepped in white paint and tracked it right across the pavers and the back porch, up to the sliding glass door. Miraculously, the paint always came off right before he stepped into our house. He managed to leave our baskets full and dyed eggs hidden around the living and dining rooms without getting even a toe print on the floor.