Opinion: Rheta Grimsley Johnson - When we were children
When we were children, I gave my little sister a hard time. She was six years younger, always the perfect age to dupe into performing extra chores, or to send on a fool’s errand. To keep her out of my hair, I taught Sheila how to “pick rocks,” as one normally would harvest peas or butterbeans, and she once spent several hours curbside filling a sand bucket with unremarkable gravel. She killed flies at family picnics, five for a penny.
She survived anyhow. And that is what she remains: a survivor. My little sister became one of the most stubborn, independent, hardworking and interesting people I know. And, one of life’s little ironies, I now relish spending time with her.
She was the only one of us who paid the least attention to my grandmother’s needlework lessons. Sheila learned from our granny how to crochet, while the rest of us were out balancing barefoot on a utility spool as it rolled through the barnyard. She learned to work a foot pedal on the old machine while I watched TV.
I have her on my mind because of the photo of her daughter, my niece Chelsey, stuck with a magnet to the refrigerator, leftover from Halloween. Chelsey is wearing one of a series of elaborate costumes Sheila made. In this one Chelsey is a pint-sized Scarlett, dressed in Miss Ellen’s jade portieres.
Sheila and I once went together to France, dragging Chelsey along. At age 13, Chelsey was in a rare foul humor that lasted, oh, a couple of years. Puberty, I believe it’s called.
Sheila, on the other hand, was spellbound, and, to my surprise, most impressed by the doors of Paris, their antiquity and substance, their varying styles and colors. “Even the doors are beautiful!” she said again and again. It was something I’d never even noticed.
Most of our get-togethers involve some home-improvement project, and my old house is the one usually being improved. When I write I stare at the cascading roses on the wallpaper Sheila helped me hang after a renovation two decades ago. And when I say “helped,” I mean she did most of the work as I fetched tools and held the drooping end of the sticky mess.
About halfway through, around midnight, we both felt ill and decided to curl up on the unmade bed. But first, thank goodness, I went to the kitchen for aspirins and realized the roaring and unvented gas heater no longer had its “natural” vents beneath doors where thresholds recently had been added.
I figure we were one pink paper rose away from being asphyxiated.
On some days I get tired of the busy wallpaper scheme and think of replacing or covering it. Then I remember that night and how giddy we became after discoving our brush with disaster. I leave the paper for another year.
There’s an old black-and-white snapshot of Sheila and our first pet, a blond, had to be, cocker spaniel named Maxie. It was taken with what Mother called “the Brownie” – a term she applied generically to all cameras, including my pride-and-joy Nikon. That pretty Christmas dog began Sheila’s passionate love affair with animals, giving her a philosophy that always has put a premium on underdogs, on all creatures great and small. And I’m grateful to benefit from her charitable nature and be pardoned for past sins, innumerable though they be.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon … And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.