Eleven Is Like...

If Mr. and Mrs. Rees have 11 children and not one of them has decided to throw out all of their crap before moving out to pursue adulthood and each individual child kept mementos from each year of their life and on average moved out when they were 23 then how many layers of crap is Rachel going to have to go through to find the back of the storage shed?

253 Layers

That’s 253 layers of ballet costumes, batting averages, Nursing school homework, badly written poetry, action figures, favorite dolls, original knock-knock jokes, and lots and lots of black widows that have been the only hands and eyes that have seen all thus crap for years. 

 If I’m going to be elbow-deep in these 253 layers then I get to write about it.  Yes, I am aware that the badly written poetry was from me but I’m still the oldest girl and in charge of everybody and everything.

Each child has three main layers that accumulate all items: childhood, high school, and college, all of which took place while living with our parents.  These layers were layered into cupboards, sheds, closets, and garages as the child continued through life until a human being was insane enough to marry into this hot mess and then the Rees child was gone…leaving the layers behind.  Whatever Rees child was left to take over that recently married sibling’s space was then free to move all of those layers to a different closet, shed, cupboard so that the unmarried sibling could continue layering his/her layers until another insane person came along to whisk him/her away.  I think the system worked great up until about the 200^th layer.  It was then that we could have opened the Massive Museum of Art and Artifacts of Three Decades of Reesdom and made plenty off of the ticket sales. 

It’s all under control now.  The big sister is here to rescue the remaining Rees babies from being crushed by the impending landslide of 253 layers of “really important memories that I just can’t throw away.”

I’m like a ghost-buster but only for Reeses. A Rees-buster.

The question is, who cares about my stories? 

Don’t you know anything?

A storyteller never cares if you want to hear the story.  A storyteller just tells stories to whoever dares make eye contact.  We think, “They’ve made eye contact.  They want a story.”  It’s the same instinct that the people who sell stuff at mall kiosks have.  I know you know what I’m talking about.  I got my storytelling from my Grandpa Rees.  You can’t escape until Grandpa and I said The End. 

So, you want to hear some stories?  Like you have a choice.