Second Play

Last night I sat around with my brothers and sisters, drinking margaritas, playing poker, passing around the next generation and enduring all-too-familiar teasing. It's a way they show their love, the teasing, the ribbing, the ohgoodnessgraciousmakeitstop joking. It makes me fear introducing someone new to them because they'd have to be made of hardy stuff to get through the night.

My siblings are making me laugh a great deal, though, the way they seem so much more overprotective of me these days. I used to live nearly five hundred miles away and hardly thought about it. That may be an incorrect assumption, but it's not like my brothers called often and my sister would say she missed me, but she had her own life going on. But now that I'm here, Eli has taken to beating me over the head that he's glad for my presence (it's a brutal sort of love that I don't quite understand), while both Becky and Ace make sure I call when I get home after leaving their homes, despite the distance between mine and theirs has dwindled down to just a couple miles.

Perhaps they know something I don't, but I think I'm better off just rolling with it.