*Thinking back on my childhood brings with it a myriad of feelings and emotions. My early life was unpredictable, to say the least. I was born as the only child (and a huge surprise at that!) of my two parents, but the baby of five older half-sisters and one older half-brother. My parents found each other late in their lives and I think they were both trying to make things better for themselves when I popped up in the picture. They divorced when I was a toddler, so I've never really had any memories of the three of us together. Nor did I ever have the 'normal' sibling experience of having brothers or sisters near my age in the house with me. But I do remember the day my dad came into my Pepto-Bismol pink bedroom to tell me that my sister Joni, her husband Rick, and their three boys were moving down to Florida with us. I don't know if I even knew who they really were at the time. I was so young, and my life with my dad consisted of being with him every other weekend. I remember being worried about having to share my dad, and my life, with three yucky boys. But I am so glad that they came.
*The "boys" as they were collectively named early on, came crashing into my world like a triple tornado, and they effectively changed the course of my life from day one. I think we were instantly bonded and tied to the hip from the moment we met. Larry is one month older than me and I used to love holding it over his head that he was supposed to be calling me Aunt Casey! I know I drove him bonkers! He was definitely the smartest kid my own age that I had ever known. And man, oh man, was I proud to know him and be his aunt! Then there was Eric, the middle boy. Eric was always the one in the middle of everything, as a matter of fact! Where Larry stayed focused on his own tasks, Eric had to be a part of whatever was going on. He was up for anything! He was never too tired or too complacent to play with me. Larry, on the other hand, quickly grew into his own friends and made sure to establish boundaries as needed. He had much more important things to worry about than sneaking rubber snakes into mailboxes to scare my step mom Mary Martha (aka "Scary Martha"). Things like hacking into this weird thing called the world wide web, when the rest of us only used computers for playing Math Crunch at school. Lastly, there was Chris. The youngest of the three... The one my dad (their granddad) nicknamed "LS", which stood for Little Shit (it was an affectionate term, he gave it to my son Nate when he was born, as well). Chris was mine and Eric's tagalong, or so we thought! It didn't take long for us both to realize that we were really Chris's tagalongs! He always knew the most fun and mischievous way to get anything accomplished and loved playing pranks!! He took alot of heat that the three of us probably should've shared (it's always easier to blame the one everyone else suspects is the culprit anyway!)
*My days as a kid are filled with memories of bike rides along sand-dune lined roads to the Tom Thumb to spend all the money we had managed to hustle out of the adults in our house that day. We would ride the mile-long journey to that convenience store, legs burning, lungs gasping for air, and then we'd stock up on more junk food than anyone should ever devour in their lifetime, much less in an hour! We would take our prizes and treasures to the beach, hide behind a sand dune and a spray of sea oats and have the time of our lives. Then we would immediately begin the hunt for the coolest jellyfish or hermit crab we could get in our grasps (yes, you can hold some jellyfish consequence-free, you just have to know the difference). Having saved the poor unsuspecting tourists on the beach from the evils of the tentacles and claws of these beach monsters, we would head back to the two-story stucco haven we called home base. We would inevitably be sunburned and exhausted, but just you try to convince us to stay home and skip the same adventure tomorrow! No way Jose!!
*Hey, wanna know the perfect way to really piss off a bunch of grown ups?! Just ask us! We can tell you what worked for us: hide all of the remote controls to all of the tv's out in the back yard's beach-sand landscape. And then forget which sand dune you hid them in! Man! I don't think we'll ever live that one down. I'm pretty sure there might be a police report sitting around somewhere! Wanna know how to get under the skin of all your neighbors and get them to call your folks to complain about you? Simple! Just habitually steal their newspapers out of their Pensacola News Journal boxes in the wee hours of the morning before anyone else is even up. I'll never know how all those grumpy old snow birds knew it was us!
*We had an old tennis court, the fencing around it covered in an overgrowth of dense vegetation, making it feel oh-so-fort-like, in the middle of our subdivision, Villa Sabine, where we would go and camp out at all day and catch horny toads and roly polies and, on a really great day, tadpoles galore. Across from the tennis court lived a flock of geese... who were the meanest damn creatures in Sabine! You better pedal your bike super fast past that house, or risk getting bit in the ass... just ask any of the four of us (Chris may still have a scar since I think he took the hardest bite of any of us!)
*Our favorite forbidden thing to dare each other to do, was to see how far we could get down the road to where the Environmental Protection Agency sat, all gated and governmentally-protected looking. We'd meander down that road, pedaling slowly and looking as innocent as possible (not an easy feat, let me assure you), and checking over our shoulders to make sure we weren't being followed by the CIA or what-not (as Larry always assured us we were). It never failed that about half-way down, we would chicken out and make a break for it! We would pedal as fast as our little legs would allow until we were safe at last. This would usually land us at our Nano's house, because there was no safer place in all the world than in her welcoming home. She would always bring out the ice milk (not ice cream, mind you!) and make sure we ate our fill. She would stir in a little extra milk and vanilla extract to make an ice cream soup (which is still my favorite desert to this day). She never cared how much sand we tracked in, or if our hands were dirty or clean. We would sit at her bar, content with being waited on hand and foot, until we were sure we had managed to lose the FBI who had been hot on our trails just moments before. And then we would begin the trek back to the house to see what else we could get ourselves into.
*About halfway there, we would pass the "castle house" where, everyone knew, the weird old couple that lived there had buried their small children in their front yard under the huge tombstone-like rocks that lined their fencing. We would speculate about how those kids had died for the rest of the journey home, the story changing and getting more horrific each time it was told. When we finally arrived home, it was usually time to go swimming in Sabine Bay, the best damn place to swim in all of Pensacola Beach... and perhaps the world. This was where we spent the majority of our childhoods, I think. Larry would usually rejoin us at this point, although he didn't fully participate in our childish games, preferring instead to just watch the goings-on around him (and probably plotting his take-over of the world as he sat on the pier gazing across the bay).
*Eric and I would find the old green aluminum fishing boat, flip it over, pull it out as far as we dared to go in the bay, and hide under it in the water. It was there, in the safety of the underside of the boat, that we would giggle and laugh as quietly as possible until our sides were aching as poor little Chris would be calling for us from the shoreline, pleading with us to stop hiding from him. Eric and I would stay in the water under that boat until our fingers were as wrinkled as dehydrated prunes and finally reveal ourselves to Chris, who by this point knew right where we were but, much to our disappointment, had given up caring long before.
*We would then swim out to the sand bar, shuffling our feet in the sand as walked like we had been trained to do from birth. It was imperative, after all, to make sure you kick up those sting rays out from their hiding places under the sand so you don't step on them, like our granddad Rupert was rumored to have done years before. Thoughts of blackened, poisoned feet were the motivators for the diligence we used on that sand bar. We would inevitably get bored (it turns out the sand bar is only interesting from a mysterious distance) and tired and realize how far we had to swim to get back to dad's pier, so we would plan the piggyback swimming schedule to get back. We would take turns pulling each other until we finally reached the sanctuary that was 256 Sabine Drive.
*Night would fall, we would succumb to the heaviest eyelids ever known to mankind, and all pass out, piled up on brown leather Lazy Boy recliners, in front of a huge screen tv, sipping chocolate milk from frosted glasses, covered up with the down comforters that were necessary in the meat-freezer like temperatures of our stucco abode.
*Now I'm all grown-up, the boys are all grown-up, and we're scattered all about... But get any combination of us together at any given moment in time, and you will soon see what I've known for years: Larry, Eric, and Chris (AKA "The Boys") might be my nephews biologically speaking, but in every other possible way, they are the truest and best *brothers* this little girl could've ever been blessed with. I'm so glad that God brought them to me that day... And I'm still so proud of each and every one of them. They brought smiles, laughter, and happiness to my childhood... And they continue to provide me with these essentials in my adulthood. I love you three... You will always be *my* boys. Without you, I wouldn't be... me.
Love,
Me
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