Day 229

Girl having a henna tattoo done at India Day at the Hatch Shell in Boston.

The first case of EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis) in humans, or West Nile Virus, has been reported in Rhode Island, so there has been spraying of southeastern Massachusetts and various warnings on the radio.  I heard an expert talking last night, and he said "Mammal-butting mosquitoes pose the greatest threat to humans..." and instantly there was this image in my head.


It was my brother's birthday on Saturday.  His name is the same as my husband's, Timothy John.  He is 62, seven years older than I am.  He was a typical older brother, frequently holding me down and tickling me to near asphyxiation, but also a sweet brother quite often, taking me riding with him, that hand on my back, pushing me along so that I was flying.  I often accompanied him and his two best friends, together they were called "The Three Musketeers", and I became the honorary fourth musketeer every now and then.  I don't think my mother asked him to take me, I think he just enjoyed my company.

He built a very tall tree-house once when I was four or five, and when it was finished pulled me up in a bucket on a pulley he had rigged up.  I have a clear memory of seeing the neighbours' houses like I had never seen them before, also the large bum and then rapidly diminishing figure of the old lady behind us working in her garden, kneeling to pull up weeds.

He became the source of all  my worldly knowledge of things about which it was difficult to ask my parents.  We had a warm and close relationship, a mutual love of literature, poetry and the music of the day, and I felt great empathy for him when girlfriends broke up with him, or something made him sad.

He went to study at Edinburgh University and never returned, so we have lived on different continents for most of our very different lives, but when we are together we connect with an immediacy born of this bond of blood.  Once I had not seen him for ten years, and went to the airport in Cape Town to meet him, accompanying a number of other excited family members.  When I saw his tall figure coming through the International Arrivals door, my eyes just fountained tears, completely unexpected, I was utterly overcome with emotion.  He greeted several people and then saw me standing there in such distress, strode over and just enfolded me in his long arms. 

He chose to have a family reunion for his 60th birthday here with us in Massachusetts, although in the end my sister couldn't join us because she had broken her ankle!  And without our parents either, who had both died quite recently.  For his present I painted a picture of our parents when they were young, standing at the base of their family tree, the branches my older sister, my brother and myself.  I also made him a book of  "The Dandelion Girl", a beautiful science fiction short story he had given me to read so many years ago.

Siblings are forever bound together, attached by the invisible thread of early memories.