Five siblings; four of them girls. Don’t have sympathy for that lone boy. He did just fine harassing his sisters. For example, hiding under our beds at night to grab our ankles.

I thought I’d interview the youngest sister. The baby of the family. You know, the one who got away with everything. Probably because she was so dang cute.

Did you really, from your perspective, get away with everything? Remember now, I had to wait until high school to wear nylons and you didn’t, so be honest.

Did I get away with everything? Absolutely not. The only boy of the family did. He could skip school. Smoke. Drink. Drive earlier. I think the parents were more strict with me after things he did. But I did get to do things sooner than you did. Like wear nylons or pants or makeup.

(An aside: I believe she wore pants even sooner than she had permission to, by smuggling jeans to school.)

Who was the most perfect sibling? Remember now, I’d get up in the middle of the night to take care spiders for you.

Most perfect? You. Duh. Never got in trouble. Never disobeyed or swore or talked back. Was the perfect child. Read all the time. Didn’t stay out late. Didn’t cause any drama or anger for parents. Lived at home the longest. Definitely the favorite child.

(An aside: geez, I was boring.)

Can you overcome childhood trauma to tell us of your experiences with liver and onions?

I think this is what started my food OCD. I was forced to eat liver and onions. Literally. I hated it. Would take me hours to be able to eat it. Gagging. Our sister Beth would sit with me giving suggestions on how to get it down. I couldn’t leave the table until I was finished and mom discovered early on that the dog was the recipient so that option didn’t last. Hiding it in a napkin was also discovered. To this day the smell makes me sick and brings back traumatic memories.

(An aside: it really was that bad. It would be time for bed and she’d still be in tears, gagging and barfing at the table.)

Have you ever forced your favorite sister into a life of crime? Remember now, you made me stop the car so you could uproot a political sign. Might be time to confess.

Did not force my sister into a life of crime. Ever. She was goody two shoes and never did anything wrong. Yes, other than stealing the political sign that I hung in my room that made me feel like I was married to Woody. And, it was her idea!

(An aside again: This was the era of the Bay City Rollers and her favorite was Woody. The political sign was a local politician running for re-election with the last name of Woody. We took the sign and the post and everything. But she never did marry Woody. His loss.)

Can you respond to allegations that you were actually the one who wet the bed and let your favorite sister take the blame for years?

I plead the 5th.

Get your brother in trouble all over again by telling us about the time you were sitting on the hood of his car, or about the rope swing.

Too much to list. But the highlight was when he thought he was being funny and going to scare me. So I am sitting on the hood of his car. After all, why not? All of a sudden he steps on the gas and I flew off. Sprained my wrist which was very painful but not as painful as telling mom. Than the rope swing. In all honesty not his fault but his idea. Swinging out over a slope on a rope tied to tree branch. When it was my turn the rope breaks. Landed on the tree trunk and pulled ligaments in my ankle. We got in a lot of trouble over that one. Was on crutches for a long time. Dad made me a shoe for that foot because mine wouldn’t fit. Cut toes off one of his shoes. I was so embarrassed wearing it. But I got super good using crutches and could even run. When I didn’t need them anymore Dad literally had to teach me to walk again. I’m still not coordinated.

Did you, or did you not, live with a tumbleweed?

Ah, the tumbleweed. I was fascinated by them. They would blow in the wind like a ball. I finally got my very own on a trip and displayed it proudly in my room. Ironically ended up living where they were in abundance and I could watch them out my windows.

Please take a moment to double check the accuracy of your answer to the second question. (Unless of course, you answered it correctly.)

Can’t remember what that question was.

What do you wish I’d asked you?

How it was all those years sharing a bedroom and how it felt growing up the youngest and always having a houseful of people, to being one of the last to leave the herd.

(A final aside: how it was sharing a room? She had to tape a line on the floor that all my junk couldn’t cross.)

I confess I love those stupid social media questions where they say ‘you’ve been kidnapped – the person coming to rescue you is the character in the last book you read’ or the character from the last movie you watched. Those questions always get me thinking about all the wonderful characters I’ve come across in books.

Plus, I always answer with Amos Burton, a character from The Expanse books, and now the television series. He’s a fascinating character because he had this horrific childhood that’s alluded to in the books but never, thankfully, detailed, and that background left him with no sense of right or wrong. He recognizes that he’s broken so he finds someone that he thinks is a good person and follows them as his moral compass. ‘No trouble unless there’s trouble, then lots of trouble’.

All that got me thinking of characters from books that have stayed with me long after finishing the book, and what made them so memorable.

Homily Clock. The mother from The Borrowers series by Mary Norton. She lived a life of safety and security in the semi-darkness under the kitchen floorboards. She never saw ‘human beans’ and never saw the outdoors so when her family had to escape into the fields she was terrified of everything. She would cry and grumble and delay and try to avoid, and in the end she always did what needed to be done to keep her family safe. She showed more courage than any other character in those books.

Amelia Peabody. Because, well, if you know me, the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters has been a steadfast favorite for many years. I loved how her opinion of herself and her hero abilities were so different from the opinions of the others who loved her. And it was great how the author showed those different opinions even though the books were written in first person, from Amelia’s viewpoint. For example, she always carried a little pistol and would pull it to save the day, convinced in her mind that she was a marksman, only to terrify her family and send them fleeing.

Mole, from the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. He looked at life with such wondrous innocence and joy. Every tiny little thing was something to be fully experienced and I think as we get older we lose that sense of wonder and magic and the simple happiness of a picnic basket by the side of the river on a spring day with your friends.

Lynn Schooler. This is kind of cheating as technically he’s not a character. He’s a real person who wrote a memoir called Walking Home. But that book stays with me because of the unbelievable courage it took to decide one day to step out into the wilderness and go for a walk.

Faina. The child from The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. She stays with me because of how the story allowed me to remember the magic of fairy tales. And the book left me with the mystery of who she really was.

Winnie. The teenager from The Geography of Water by Mary Emerick. A beautifully written story and a young girl who walks away from her life in order to live, and then returns.

Obviously this could be a really long list. So I’ll keep it short with just the ones that come immediately to mind, and ask you to remind me of more characters that come into our stories and don’t leave us.

It’s been an interesting few months. The pendulum has swung from scorching weather, to evacuation from a wild fire, to heavy rain and debris flow risk, to lots of snow and long power outages. I suggested to my husband that we sell everything, get a recreational vehicle, and hit the road. He said ‘not yet’. I suggested to my sister that we move in with her. She laughed.

All in jest of course. But it has been overwhelming, especially for my husband who is spending a lot of time fixing things and rigging things up and taking things apart in order to put them back together.

And then there was Rat. We’ve had mice in the house. We’ve even had rats in a house we lived in previously. But this one deserves a capital letter.

My husband is a big softie. He’s been known to babysit a nest of mice in his toolbox to keep me from feeding them to the chickens. A few weeks ago he saw the lid of our recycle bin had blown up in the storm and was getting rain inside. When he shut the lid, he saw two rats. One had drowned and the other was struggling, so he put a long stick inside for it to climb out.

Rat: ‘My new best friend! My savior! I’m going to follow him home!’

It didn’t take long before we started hearing rattling around in the kitchen walls. It didn’t take long before our new dishwasher quit working because the power cord was chewed through and some mysterious part broken. It didn’t take long before Rat discovered my pantry.

It didn’t take long before I started setting traps.

We have a cat who is an amazing rodent-catcher. She stores them in the bathtub to play with later and even catches critters at the neighbor’s and brings them home. But she wasn’t catching Rat and she started sleeping at the opposite end of the house. I admit I had unkind thoughts about her not catching things in her own home.

The thing is, she’s a petite cat. If you haven’t read blog posts here before, this is a cat my husband found on the road in a rainstorm and brought home tucked inside his shirt. The little bedraggled scrap now rules the house. But she was ignoring Rat.

We found out why when, two rat traps, one five-gallon bucket, and a ski pole later, we saw just how huge Rat was. It got caught in two traps at the same time and that didn’t even slow it down. I’d say it was bigger than our cat, but because of my storyteller powers of exaggeration, in reality it might have been a tiny bit smaller. Maybe. Either way it was obvious why the cat had been sleeping at the other end of the house. The thing was huge.

You’d think having a rat in the house compared to everything else going on would be trivial. But having a giant Rat eating your dishwasher while waiting for debris flow landslides and watching the snow bury your car was kind of the last straw. That’s when I suggested we move in with my sister. For now though, paths are shoveled, Rat has moved on to wherever rat spirits go, the power is back, generator gas cans are full, the wood box is full, and the pantry is stocked.

So is all back to normal then? Is all good in our world? I started writing this blog post after my son came into the kitchen.

‘Mom, there’s another one.’