Sporty, Spitty, and Airy

When I was 6 years old and my sister was 8, we used to play together, and we developed our own language. We decided that people were either spitty, sporty or airy. When an uncle came to visit we'd say, did you see the spit in the corners of his mouth while he ate his eggs this morning? That was spitty. If someone's shirt was open at the top and they were breezy and too cool, that was airy. And if someone was always in a hurry, and chewing gum, licking fingers to get a grip when turning pages of a book, wearing nail polish, lipstick and jewelry, that was sporty.

We used to lip-sync to Cyril Richard's records, "you're so much a part of me, a part of me, the two of us are one." I wonder what my sister would think if she heard those songs now. Would she remember the little window of time when we shared a bedroom and actually played together for hours. All of this was before our differences became evident, and amplified by our mother, before we learned to loathe each other, and fight instead of play. We're still trying to figure it out, how to receive each other as adults, without falling back under the spell of the attitudes we learned from childhood.