"Do you remember that feeling of being carried up the stairs in your daddy's arms?" Lynette asked me with her lazy summer voice.
She was twirling the bottom of her braid and wagging her legs out over the edge of the porch of the big old family farm house. The light had left the sky an hour earlier and the stars and lightening bugs were just starting to twinkle.
Besides Lynette's voice, the next best sound in the world to me was the night bugs. Sometimes she and I tried to stalk them, but getting to the root of the sound is like trying to catch a butterfly. Rare.
"I remember it Joe Joe," she said to me, turning for just a whisp of a moment so that she was looking right into me. "It made me feel wiggly, like I was a whooshing tree in an autumn wind."
I smiled to myself at the thought of my big sister as a leaning tall tree. Suited her right. She was like that, with deep roots in the place so far down nothing could ever budge her, but so adventurous and pretty, she could reach up to the tip of the sky anytime she wanted to.
But then she got all still like she does sometimes. And I knew she was going to cry.
"Lynnie, don't cry. He's gonna come back someday." I scooted behind her and pushed my toes into her back, pretending to walk up it like a big spider. Our funny game.
She wasn't the kind to let sadness get her down for too long and I knew she was gonna start talking about something else soon. She was the strongest girl I ever met.
Way across the darkness of what we knew was the corn field were two tiny lights driving down the road to town.
Lynette laughed out loud like she just heard the preacher on Sunday say a curse word by accident. "Looks like old Sam forgot to bring home the sugar again!" She said, slapping her knee.
I was so relieved she was laughing I laid right down there on the rough grey wood of our porch and looked up at the rafters above me and laughed right along with her.
"Come on old young Joe Joe, let's go get us some ice cream," she said, standing up and stretching out like she was a wolf about to howl at the moon. She turned around fast, grabbed me by the waist and pulled me in through the screen door.
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