My Sister Kathy

One day my younger sister Kathy came running into the house from outside and asked Mom for a glass of water. Mom filled a glass for her. Kathy grabbed the glass, turned and hurried back outside. The door had hardly closed behind her and she was back inside asking for another glass of water.

“I’m really thirsty Mom. Can I have more water?”

Our mom filled another glass for her and Kathy immediately disappeared outside. Soon, she was back inside asking for more water. Mom refilled the glass and decided to follow her daughter. There had to be more than Kathy just being thirsty.

What she found was surprising and also fortuitous. Somewhere Kathy had found some matched. She had set a box of trash on fire that Dad had placed outside of the basement door. It was against to cement block foundation, but right above it was our wood frame home; bad combination.

Kathy was trying to put out the fire without Mom knowing it. She knew that she wasn’t to be playing with matches and wanted to avoid being punished for it.

Mom immediately grabbed the hose, turned on the faucet, and doused the flames. Kathy had at least slowed the fire until Mom put it out completely. Mom was upset and Dad wasn’t happy either when he had to clean up the soggy, charred mess it left behind.

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Kathy was at the center of the next recollection as well. She still says our brother Ken and I tried to kill her, but I say, if she hadn’t been so nosy and wasn’t trying to do what the boys did, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

Ken and I were trying to build a tree house, but let me rephrase that for you. It would be an exaggeration to have called it a house. It was a tree platform. We didn’t have enough lumber or nails to build anything more.

There was a large weeping willow in our back yard. The trunk ad three limbs that we could nail the lumber to for the framework of the platform. The tree house wasn’t going to be impressive or lofty. It was about eight feet off the ground and nothing more than a floor without walls or roof.

We had just finished nailing the three pieces into the tree as the foundation onto which we would nail the floor boards. One of us had hung the claw hammer by its claws on the wooden floor joist when Kathy decides to join us.

 Kathy started to climb up into the tree and the hammer fell. The points of the hammer cut the back of her head. She bellowed and ran away. There was blood everywhere.

I am not sure who caused the hammer to fall. It could have been her or Ken or I, we were never sure, but she still believes that we tried to kill her.