I remember getting lectured by one of my my peers. She was a girl from the in crowd, well as in as you can get in a grade one class of about ten kids.

It’s amazing how when you’re small anyone that’s even slightly older or smarter than you can seem so grown up.

I remember plugging my ears as she started.

“You know why no one likes you?!”,  and that was all I heard as my little 6 yr old fingers plugged my ears.  To this day I wonder what she said and if I had listened would I be any different? Would I have made friends? Strange how something like that can stick to ones bones.

Not long after that we moved off of our 200 acre alfalfa farm to the middle class community of Bolton Ontario, the last time I would see my older sister Janet Marie Maynard– known to us all by pebbles– alive.

It wasn’t too long after the move that it occurred. I remember it so clearly.

The summer before we had gone to the local Schomberg fair, but this was the first year I got to see my sister in action.

She was only 18 but had the body and mind of a well developed woman in her 20’s.

I followed her that year as she went from game to game flirting her way to the biggest stuffed animals from each and everyone.

A bat of the lashes and a wiggle of the hips and pow, we had the biggest purple pig I’d ever seen!

She left with a giant pig mouse elephant and a row of teddy bears.

One night after we moved she came into my room and lined them all up against my wall and told me she wanted me to babysit them until she returned, but was very clear that this was a temporary move for these precious children of hers,  and that in no way were they being abandoned.

A few nights after she left for Florida I was awoken by a sound I had never heard my mother make.

I’d never heard another human make this sound.

It was inhuman.

She was dead.

My sister was gone forever.

Drowned in a canal in dade county Florida.

She saw no light before she died she just slipped into the water.

A line from a poem I wrote but lost about her.

And so my mother too was now dead.

I remember hearing her wake screaming because in her dreams she couldn’t save her first born.

From that day forth I would never again crawl into my mother’s bed to find comfort, I’d never again touch or hug my mother.

How could I ever burden her with any more sadness?

Any problems I had in comparison were meaningless and petty to me.

They were problems I’d have to figure out by myself.

Like the dreams.

I would have these dreams that my sister was alive and in my dreams I would drive all over Florida looking for her to bring her home to mom.

But then I’d wake.

In my sisters old bed surrounded by things that use to be hers.

Including my orphaned carnival posse of fur.

And it became painfully obvious fast that I would never find her. She was gone.

And one night I would put my hands together and pray to god to please stop these nightmares. I begged with the almighty that took my sister to just bare me this one little thing and he heard me.

Because that night something different happened.

I was asleep but what I was seeing was no dream.

My sister in her blue dress stood there in the light and said don’t worry everything is ok.

And I remember going to ask her something as she faded away and she was gone.

And after than night I never had another nightmare about her again.