Today, I did not run. My ankles ached a bit and I thought I would give them a rest. But I walked in the green grass which is growing so fast, you can barely see the path my feet have beaten around the meadow. There are yellow-maned dandelions all over the place, and soon there will be milkweed plants springing up, all their beautiful pink globes of fragrance still contained in the small green shoots edging up towards the light.
Waiting outside the Y for Matthew to finish work, I saw a mother walking to the car with her two little boys, they were so similar in age they might have been twins, although one held his brother's hand very proudly, like a big brother, while the slightly smaller one was in the middle, his other hand clasping his mother's. I wish we remembered these years better, when you are two or three years old, and everything is mostly delightful.
When Nick was 8 he was invited to sleep over at a friend's house without Matthew. As I was driving him across town his excitement suddenly evaporated as he turned to me with such pain on his face and said, "I've suddenly realized that this is the first time I will be sleeping a whole night without my brother, Mom!"
As a twin you share your very beginning with your sibling. I would look down at my enormous belly in the bath and see knees and elbows and feet flailing around, the shifting babies slipping over one another, swimming towards their life.
A common fight of children in cars is for territory, saying "Don't touch me!" "Mom, he touched me!", but they never did that, they were so used to the other's proximity that life felt strange when they weren't close together. When they were very little we would ask them which one was Matt and which was Nick, and they had no idea, they would point at the other, then at themselves, and laugh with the confusion of it all.
In the mornings they would tell me their dreams and it was often the same dream, Matthew would begin telling the story of the dream and then Nick would chime in, "and then we rolled down the hill and the birds flew up into the sky and....." and Matthew would say, "...yes and then we had to get up and we ran back up the hill but then we found....."
When one was given something he always asked for the same gift for his brother. For years they asked for "half an apple, please?" From the time that they were little babies, Matthew has been doing things to make Nick laugh that wonderfully infectious laughter of his. We couldn't understand what they were saying for a long time, but they communicated perfectly in their own language.
When the boys were about 10 we were living in Winthrop. One Saturday morning Tim and I happened to glance out of the window and witness their first real fight, where they hit each other and seemed to be trying very hard to hurt one another. It happened in the garden across the street, and after a while it became very ugly, so Tim went out and picked them both up by the scruffs of their necks, marched them home,gave them a severe talking to, and told them to sort themselves out. They disappeared up to their room and there was silence for a long time. Eventually I went upstairs to check on them, to find the room in darkness and both of them lying with their eyes closed in their beds. When I asked them what they were doing they opened shocked eyes to me and said, "It was so awful Mom, we're trying to go back to sleep so that we can wake up and start the day again and pretend that it never happened."
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