Let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see…

My cousin has a birthday coming up. She’ll be six, which is a little weird for me because I still sorta think of her as an embryo.

You see, I’m the youngest of seven granddaughters. And I came trailing a good decade or so behind my six cousins, all of us girls. The family name quite literally died with me. There might have been a moment in there where everyone held their breath, hoping for just that one male to keep DeStefano alive and well in society, but, alas, I would be my parents’ only child. And while my cousins were immersed in their teenage world, I was running from one room to the next looking for somebody who cared that I could count to a thousand and had learned to successfully spell the word “Tabernacle.”

And when I tell you my cousins–two sets of three sisters–were the most beautiful girls-becoming-women I’d ever seen, I exaggerate not. In my fuzziest childhood memories I think they are actually standing in rays of light filled with angelic harpsichord as they tell me to go away and color or something, for the love of God. I was always struggling to keep up, and I never quite did, because as I grew, they of course grew as well.

For all intents and purposes, let’s pretend that I am now a grown up. I have bills and a BA in English. I could legally rent a car. I am allowed to fiddle with the thermostat. But my cousins are, of course, still way ahead of me. They have mortgages, marriages, and, the best part, children.

So while I closed the gate of one generation, my soon-to-be-six cousin (let’s call her Sunshine) opened an entirely new one. Sunshine was born, I remember, a week after I ventured into my first semester of college… I remember this because I promptly decided dorm life was not for me, and on the long drive back to Connecticut from East Bumblenowhere Vermont, my father told me that my cousin had just given birth to a girl.

This was little Ms. Sunshine herself.

When you’re the baby of the family for a good eighteen years, you don’t have the experience of knowing what it’s like to have a child around. You’re so immersed with your own childhood, and then one morning you wake up and all your Barbies have become bras. So the burp cloths and the teething rings were new territory for me. Nonetheless, I was enamored by Sunshine. At family picnics I wrestled relatives for the opportunity to hog her all for myself. I was flattered by the opportunity to change her diapers.

I’ve always wanted to be a sister. This is important to know. If you have or are a sister, I envy you. Even if your relationship with your sibling sucks, even if you haven’t spoken for twenty four years, even if your sister crashed a pinto into your wedding cake, you have something that I don’t. The word ‘sister’ doesn’t apply to me. I can never take it for my own. Ask my mother about the time I constructed a sibling out of Legos; but I digress.

Suddenly here was this little Sunshine baby that had no maximum capacity for my doting affections. She would be joined later by her sister, Sunshine Junior, and my cousins’ other children, which includes two sets of twins and the most gorgeous head of blonde curls you can imagine. But for a short while, there we were: the end of one generation and the start of another.

Now she’s about to turn six. She likes dance music and can swim underwater with her eyes open. She was passionately bereft when her pet, Princess, met an untimely end in a hamster-wheel mishap.

Last weekend, while I was babysitting, someone asked me, “So you’re, what, the big sister?”

I about melted. This lasted four seconds, and then Sunshine looped her arm in mine and proudly said, “We’re cousins.”

But actually, I think I’ve made my peace with the whole only child thing. I still feel like I missed out on exercising my amazing I-won’t-tell-mom-you-got-that-tattoo gene. I’ll never punch someone in the face for pulling my sister’s hair. But I’ve also never won the lottery or seen earth from the dark side of the moon, and those would have been pretty sweet too.

I can not be limited by what I do or do not have, which is the point of this sentimental tirade. I can’t limit my writing to my own experiences because I’d be out of ideas rather quickly. I believe life experience is valuable, but it’s only one of my many tools. I still need to detach myself from my stories. Only then can it become a story about an astronaut, a criminal mastermind, a sister, the resident of a sleepy Missouri town overrun by killer tomatoes. This is the beauty of fiction.

I’ll never have a sister. What I do have are Sunshine and Sunshine Junior chasing me with squirt guns. We walk up the street and say hello to the neighbor’s cat. We drop rocks in storm drains and listen to the *plunk* they make. And maybe when we’re seen by strangers, we’re presumed to be sisters. But maybe not. It’s a beautiful day either way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of little barbie clothes to sew for Sunshine’s sixth…