Twisted Sisters: Part 1



From left to front: Loni, Danni, Lindsi, Dexi

Having grown up under the same roof—under the roof of our mom’s quaint, white house in International Falls, Minnesota—my sisters and I all became accustomed to the same little practices and routines around the house, the same ways of cleaning and decorating and eating and playing and living, to all of the things that, in combination, made our family—just like every other family—its own unique entity.

We were the Kallerman sisters, with hair that shimmered in the sunlight like princess crowns, though we were always too busy monkeying around to notice.  Mom proudly described the shade as “golden brown.”  We had names and eyes that followed a distinct pattern.  Lindsi Dawn, the firstborn, had sophisticated eyes—a warm, pleasing mixture of brown and green hues that mirrored the lush forestland surrounding our town.  The second-born, Danni Lynn, had a dazzling, sky blue color that looked especially free and feral when framed by the golden strands of her fly-away hair.  The third-born, Loni Diana—that’s me—had hazel eyes, similar to Lindsi’s, with green and brown, but mostly brown.  I like to think that they had a kindness about them.  And Dexi Lee, the youngest, had that same radiant blue as Danni’s, but with a mesmerizing, romantic quality to them.  We were LD, DL, LD, DL, intertwined and twisted like the braids we liked to wear in our golden-stranded hair and named after our blue and hazel-eyed parental pair, Larry and Dawnelle. 

I’m sure it all sounds very neat and tidy and white-picket fence-like, but we could be quite messy.  We had to have a metal chain lock on our toy closet upstairs because without it, we threw our dolls and stuffed animals and games around so haphazardly that we had to climb over them to get through the play room.  I remember how the toys with hard, plastic edges would hurt my feet when I went wading through the litter.  The day mom instated “The Locked Closet” (that’s what my sisters and I had so dolefully dubbed it), I remember remarking how cool it was that we could actually see the floor.  “Yeah,” Mom murmured, looking mortified as she stuffed a naked Cabbage Patch doll into a black plastic bag.  “That’s how it’s supposed to be.” 

We girls romped around our neighborhood like rowdy ragamuffins, biking around barefoot and knobby-kneed, starting backyard mud fights with our friends, and, having been motivated by cartoons with the well-meaning moral “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” digging through our neighbor’s trash cans for castoff keepsakes.

Yes, we could be quite messy, but Mom did a good job of reeling us in.  The messiest thing of all was when our quiet, quirky, outdoor-loving, blue-eyed dad committed suicide one late November evening after we girls had all gone to bed.  We were ages three, four, five, and six when it happened.

It wasn’t an easy time, but we moved forward together.  Mom eventually remarried and we moved out of our cute, two-story house on Second Street and then back in again, settling back into all of those little nuances that defined our six-person family, like having “Party Night” Fridays.  At the start of every weekend, Mom would take us to Stop N’ Shop gas station to pick out two video rentals and our own bottles of pop and packs of candy.  I loved how the glass bottles would clink as we pulled them out from their frosty line-up in the store’s refrigerator.  And we would debate for ten minutes over the perfect chocolate bar or bag of fruity candy to take home for the night.  Picking two movies—and agreeing upon them—took even longer. 

One thing that was particularly characteristic of our clan was that our toilet paper was always kept in a closet outside of the bathroom.  In a house full of girls where the toilet paper unraveled rather rapidly from the roll, that was an especially irksome family staple.

Some of our customs were new ones, brought in by our new step-dad, Terry, like putting our dishes in the dishwasher immediately after use.  So was the rule that we had to ask before scrounging around in the cupboard for snacks or going to play outside.   We still didn’t shop very often, but when we did, it was a big trip, like when we all got entire new wardrobes for an upcoming school year, or when we got our own TVs for our bedrooms, or when we each got five-disc changer CD players to accompany our TVs.  With all of us girls living in such close quarters and having such distinctly different tastes in music, I’m not our generous step-dad had thought that one through very clearly. 

We had a new baby brother, Deion, when I was sixteen.  Our way of life stayed relatively the same, except  we suddenly had Baby Einstein, Thomas the Tank Engine, and Bear in the Big Blue House videos playing non-stop in our living room and Danni, Dexi, and I had a bald-headed, chubby-cheeked fan to cheer us on at our cross-country and track meets.  The only thing I didn’t like was having, “Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Big Blue House” play over and over in my head during a race I was trying to take seriously.

Lindsi was already in her first year of college when Deion was born, and over the next four years, the rest of us girls trickled off onto college, European escapades, nanny positions out of state, off the wall house-parenting gigs, cross-country road trips, marathons, marriages, and finally, babies.

Babies were what brought us together most recently.  Lindsi, Danni, and Dexi all still live in Minnesota, but in different cities.  Danni, ever the loyal homebody, has stayed around International Falls.  It was to meet her new three-month-old son and Dexi’s even newer one-month-old daughter that I decided to strap my own one-year-old chicky-babe into her car seat and trek the 800+ miles from my current residency in northeastern Wyoming to my beloved hometown this past March.   

Foolishly optimistic, I had loaded my massive double stroller into my minivan in hopes that I could put it to good use in the self-described “Icebox of the Nation.”  There wasn’t any snow on the ground when I left Gillette, but as I passed from ranchland to farmland to forestland, it became increasingly apparent to me that unless I wanted to take a stroll around the local Menard’s, that big lug wasn’t going to move an inch for the next two and a half weeks.

But that was OK with me.  Growing up, I had despised the long winters, but now I was just enjoying the view.  Although I had lived within the landscape for over half of my life, it looked somehow different to me on this trip—new.  I kept thinking of Bob Ross painting live on PBS, purring softly about “happy trees” and sporting that dreamy smile and infamous afro as I drove further north.  I could hear the soft “pffing” of his paint brush as he swept it back and forth like a puppy tail on top of a livening canvas, daubing purple shadows on top of the bright, white snow, scraping a mixture of black and green off his palette to render the perfect pines, breezily beckoning a bush where there hadn’t been one before.    

To be continued in the next posting…