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Having a little mid-July sisterly ranting

My sister Cathy and I had our annual mid-July rant the other evening.

It typically begins when I call her on her birthday, the backdrop again for this year’s sibling seething session.

Better Half and I call her and sing in unison — if you can call it singing. It’s our rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday to you…….,” courtesy of the speaker phone, and there’s no interrupting us. We are undaunted duo.

After the concert, I was comforted to discover she was celebrating her birthday in the same fine fashion that I had marked mine — by doing nothing and resting afterward.

No husbands feeding us grapes or fanning us or rubbing our feet. (Note to self: Why not?)

Her birthday was pretty significant this year, too, given she turned 69 on July 17 and is approaching her seventh decade on the planet.

And ditto for me, since I turned 59 in April, meaning I’m running out of time to be lost in the ’50s.

That aging realization of the 60, 70 threshold got things off to a sobering start as we contemplated being the stuff of AARP articles.

But it was more crabbing about the calendar thing, not really the aging process, though the calendar does has a say-so in that for sure.

Having a birthday in mid-July should mean we’re all still in a mid-summer frame of mind, right, we lamented to each other

But maybe not.

Certainly not in the stores, we began to observe.

I confessed I have to walk into places these days with squinting eyes, afraid I’ll spot another display of school supplies.

Ugh!

I don’t even have to buy any of that stuff any more, but the too-early sight of it still stings.

There’s nothing like glue sticks and loose-leaf paper muscling out the summer stuff to put a mid-July thinking person on the brink of despair.

There’s just something terribly wrong with that in my spiral notebook.

Cathy understood, especially since she’d gone to a store to buy a picture frame and noticed Halloween decorations were on the shelves.

Now that’s scary.

I still want to buy flowers and solar lights and summer things.

After our conversation had ended, our calendar observations done, Cathy and I bid each other farewell until the next gab-and-gripe session.

Better Half shook his head, expressing surprise that any such thing was occurring.

He hadn’t noticed any school supplies for sale, except for maybe a random lunch bag here and there.

And he certainly hadn’t come face to face with any Halloween decorations.

I want to be like Better Half when I grow up, if I ever decide to, I thought to myself.

Oh to be oblivious.

I had half a notion to ask him to fetch me some grapes.

And a little foot rub wouldn’t hurt either.

(Kiaski, a resident of Richmond, is a staff columnist and community editor for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily. She can be contacted at jkiaski@heraldstaronline.com.)

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