Copy Cat

I was just doing some grading and listening to country music when one of my favorite songs came on and acted as fuel for my memory. I started thinking about growing up in the same house as Ryan. Some of these are my favorite memories because we were young and innocent and it was these years that I remember living with him most; some of my most fond memories. Once he hit his teen years, we were only living under the same roof off and on.

These lyrics hit me...

"I know they say you can’t go home again
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine
Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar."

When I was younger, Ryan wanted to learn to play the guitar. A few years later, I had a guitar and was getting lessons. Ryan enjoyed taking pictures of nature. A few years later I had my first camera and was taking pictures of anything and everything. Ryan liked a certain band and days later I was blaring the same band in my bedroom, non stop. Ryan wanted to play baseball, and a few days later I was signed up for tee ball. Ryan rode four-wheelers and motorcycles all the time, as most people in our family did up at the cabin, but it wasn't often that you'd see Ryan on his four-wheeler without a little girl on the back, a blonde pony tail sticking out of the helmet, flopping around with every turn and jolt.

At the time Ryan got mad and called me a copy cat and told me to get my own hobbies and interests. As we got older and took different paths, even when he wouldn't admit it, I knew he was secretly so happy when I enjoyed the same things he did. He took pride in the fact that someone like me would want to be anything close to someone like him. He had no idea how much I looked up to him despite how we both acted. I always wanted to be around him.

When we were about 12 we were playing tee ball at the neighbors and my suspenders were broken so I only had one strap latched. As I hit the ball and ran to first base, the second latch busted and my pants fell. As a pre-teen playing with a handful of boys, you can only imagine how mortified I was. Ryan laughed but then he walked me home so that I could change.

We spent hours and hours in the evening playing Jail Break and Capture the Flag with the Theis Boys and Cara Lachat and James Nye. I was always amazed at how talented he was at hiding from people and sneaking around in the dark. I still wonder how we played in the entire neighborhood... it was pretty big. This might explain why the games lasted for hours ;) but the last few times I remember us playing, I'd watch Ryan get all decked out in dark clothing and gloves and camo. He would always let me wear some of his black clothes... a black hat and a black sweatshirt.


“A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.”

I fear, every day, that my memory will fail me or that I will run out of memories but they just keep flowing. A good friend and coworker told me that even if you have a not-so-sharp memory, these sorts of things, they always stay with you. We don't forget the things that really matter and the things that are most important to us. They stay with us always.... This meant so much to me because she has faced a similar loss. I don't know many people who have lost a sibling and it can be difficult to get anyone to relate to how you are feeling unless they, too, have experienced something similar. It's just very comforting.

"I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can..."

- Lil Sis