Learn to love, to love your brother

Another Wednesday evening, another realm all to myself. The past few days have been busy and breathless and over-peopled. So much family drama, intrigue, chaos... So much obsession on my part - even in sleep, it would seem. I've developed the telltale wrinkle of the chronically vexed - a vertical fissure off-center between my eyebrows - a daily, deepening reminder that I am no longer young. (And yet, I know one day I will look back and see myself for the babe that I am. It can always get worse; you will always get older. But, on the other hand, as Grandma Dot used to say, "It's better than the alternative.") I had a funny idea of changing my WhatsApp photo to the hourglass from "Days of Our Lives" - a soap opera that my childhood babysitters followed. As a kid, I always felt immensely conflicted about soap operas. My mother had precious few rules about the usual things, but I knew that she hated soap operas and didn't want me exposed to them. My babysitters were by no means religious or fanatical about "Days", but on the occasions that they did put it on, I'd feel guilty and uncertain, awkward in my amusements. I'd busy myself with solitary games away from the cozy, low-ceilinged "back room", where everyone gathered to watch TV. I'd ask if I could rather go and dust the "sitting room", where there were tall sash windows and unsettling Hummel figurines, glass paperweights on lace tablecloths, and an enormous braided rug. On the wall in the sitting room was a grouping of individual black and white framed photos of my babysitters in their christening gowns and bonnets. There were six of them (four girls and two boys), which made it handy for my mother: over the years, if one outgrew me, another would come along and take up the post. I loved looking at their baby photos - you could see the whole person each one would turn into, you could read familiar light in all of their eyes. It was tremendously reassuring somehow. But then, once I could hear that the TV was finished weeping syrup for the day, I would return to the back room and stand close to the wood stove, which could not possibly have been as tall as I remember it. The back room was connected to the mud room, which itself led to a more barn-like space where puppies were kept during puppy season. They had a chocolate lab named Patricia who had several litters over the years. She lived with her mother, a black lab named Princess. All my memories of that house are fond ones, even if colored at times by the anxiety of a soap opera.  Many years later, the bathrooms were remodeled and a poltergeist unleashed. It was either in the business of fiendishly tormenting or merely inconveniencing the living, depending on who you asked.