Allow me to explain through an Interpretive Dance: Exquisite Emily

I dislike the delightfully trite phrase “ You don’t choose your family but you do choose your friends.” I think it is bogus. I do not doubt for a second I chose my family. I know I chose my sister. People talk all the time about how they recognized their spouse instantly or felt they had known them in some other time and place. I am still waiting for that experience with a man but I have certainly experienced said recognition with my siblings.

I was enamored with Emily from the very beginning. Today my mom informed me that as a baby it was a Herculean task to get me to sleep. (It still is…fortunately for my mother and siblings, ambien is now the only thing burdened with the task of putting me to sleep) They tried everything. At one point they even flipped the crib to cage me, the wild insomniac baby. It wasn’t until I was moved into Emily’s Laura Ashley adorned paradise that I began to sleep. To this day Emily is the only person I can share a bed with. She is an easy person to sleep next to. She makes me feel at home in foreign places, safe, and completely free to be myself.

I idolized Emily but I was not an easy little sister. I thought she was the most beautiful, kind and interesting person on earth, but I had a funny way of showing of it… I desperately desired her attention and would do just about anything to get it. I would throw her porcelain dolls down the stairs and watch them shatter on the tile of the foyer. I would say wildly inappropriate things to her friends. At one point I became so upset with her diverted attention that I threw her best friend’s shoes into our toilet. On one particularly devious occasion I even attempted the lemonade stunt… Yes… I was practically the love child of Dennis the Menace and the frightening red head from the “Problem Child” movies…

As I got older we moved into more typical tensions. I would “borrow” her clothes. I would infringe upon her primp time in our shared bathroom. I would slightly “haze” her boyfriends. I would look through her signed yearbooks and call every guy who had written their number pretending to be her…(by the time I was 12 she and I had almost identical voices)

Not that Emily was completely innocent either… During her mildly alarming yet somehow endearing thespian phase she would write and direct plays to be performed on our back porch. She never cast me as the princess, fairy or anything remotely feminine. (not that the porcelain doll thrower seems the best casting choice for the particularly docile roles) I was cast as Gus-Gus and caked in gray stage makeup on more than one occasion.

Emily could always make me laugh. For those of you who know me, you know it isn’t hard to make me laugh, but very few can make me laugh to the extent of crying and vomiting in the same way as Emily. She had an interpretive dance for everything. To this day my favorite Christmas tradition is when Emily begins to perform her interpretive dance of the trees.

Emily is my hero. Not because she excels at interpretive dance or was once a great playwright. She is my hero because she is exquisite. There really isn’t a better word for her. She possesses a beauty and goodness that is rare. Even in her Blossom hat days she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. This exquisite beauty transcends her looks. She treats people beautifully. She writes beautifully. She speaks beautifully. She thinks beautifully and she mothers beautifully. She has fought her way through many heartbreaks, disappointments and challenges and has only come through more lovely and gracious. Most people if asked to encounter what Emily had encountered would have become jaded, cynical and apathetic. Emily has only continued to thrive and beautify.

One of the great joys of my life has been to watch my beautiful sister marry a man who saw how exquisite she truly was, and watch her become a mother. The only human on this earth I maybe love more than Emily is her daughter Grace. I love to watch Grace and Emily together. I love to watch Grace look at Emily. I can see in her sweet face that she knows everything I know about Emily. She knows her mother has a goodness and kindness that is rare. She knows her mother is brilliant and hilarious. She knows her mother has deep rooted faith and hope. And most of all she knows her mother was the perfect woman to choose in order to learn what it means to be exquisite.