Editor's Column

by Benjamin Tertin

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Critty Could Whittle a
Fine Spear Point

I never let her play Barbies. No pink teddy bears. No tea parties. No dress up. Christy was my partner.

While other 5-year-old girls dangled plastic pearls from their necks and struggled to balance in mothers' high heels, Christy, my sister, executed blackbirds with a Marksman slingshot.

Her friends made sweet sprinkled muffins in Easy-Bake ovens while Christy -- "Critty" as I called her -- tightened square knots and whittled spear points with me in the back woods.

She was my best friend. Kid brothers and sisters usually scream and bicker and punch and kick, but Critty and I were inseparable.

Outfitted in her "jammies with feet" that Gramma sewed, she would burst into my room on Saturday mornings to make sure I didn't sleep through Bugs Bunny. Parental regulations allowed one hour of television per week, and Bugs had the only worthy show on the air.

When she couldn't pull her sled through the deep Wisconsin snow, I hauled it for her. Sometimes she needed momentum on the swing set; I gave her an underdog.

And when she discovered that riding skateboards behind a speeding bicycle was more thrilling than traditional skateboarding, I secured a tow rope to my seat post and brought that bike up to top speed. The skateboard veered sideways, hurling Critty's face into the chrome bumper of a parked sedan. But I was there to help her walk off the headache.

At the time, I didn't see myself as too bossy; she only had to do whatever I said. I might have recognized such an abuse of power sooner if she hadn't been so kind and compliant. She never complained when I rejected any and every suggestion that resembled something girly.

"Let's play house," Critty would say with a freckled smile and her Pippi Longstocking pigtails flailing. "I'll be the mom!"

"House? What in the world?" I said. "No, no way."

Even if inclement weather forced us to stay inside, we most certainly would not be pretending that I was the dad and she was the mom and Strawberry Shortcake was our tea-sipping, plastic-banana-eating child.

Maybe, just maybe, I would agree to play "bank" from inside a big cardboard box, complete with a teller window and Fisher-Price cash register. I didn't mind taking care of some business with Monopoly money, but "house" was for girls, not for my sister. She accepted her lot.

She was proud to collect snakes and frogs with me. She ranked second in command of a scaled-down Indian village we constructed in the back woods--complete with a wigwam, longhouse, teepee, mud-cake cooker and lookout tower. And her constantly improving sling-shot marksmanship commanded respect from local blackbird populations.

I was proud to have a sister like her and honored to have such a companion.

Various educational mandates passed in parental legislature called for frequent school changes -- private to public to home-school. The perpetual "new kid" status that resulted became a thorn for Critty and me, making sibling unity necessary.

We moved to different churches, neighborhoods and states. Although disconnected, we didn't feel alone because we never moved away from each other, and we had the woods.

The tumult raging between our parents indoors is what motivated us to retreat to the forest so often. That dark, in-home storm wreaked an unbearable havoc.

Maybe Critty so willingly shared my backyard endeavors because the Strawberry Shortcakes lived inside. We were each other's confidant; we found sheltered comfort in each other's presence.

Those adventures continually benefit us, from square-knot tying abilities to black-bird blasting skills. Someday we'll teach our kids the proper ingredients for pinecone mud-cakes or the proper techniques for capturing water snakes and snapping turtles.

We learned to enjoy existing and exploring regardless of car bumper hits to the face or dark, unexplainable storms that "grown-ups" create.

How did we find smiles in the midst of pain?

We did not try to exist alone.

Isolation is inhuman.

Without Critty, I would still be retreating to nowhere, alone in the woods.

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