a literary playground

By: Kaleigh Kuhns

About The Piece:

This memoir explores sibling relationships and a special episode in the narrator’s life of reconnecting with siblings as adults.

My siblings and I disagree about homeschooling. The four of us spent the majority of our education at home, learning to read from novels like Les Miserables and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and learning math from the same algebra textbook. If we had science classes I don’t remember them, and the only reason that grammar and spelling came easily to me was because of how much I had read.

We are grown up now, and we have differing opinions about the value of our education. As a public school teacher, I am likely to say that I believe homeschooling should be illegal, whereas my younger sister Maggie traces our current radical ideals to our childhood of no school bells, no strict curriculum, and minimal structure. But one thing all four of us can agree on is that at least homeschooling brought us together. We were siblings, classmates, friends, confidants, rivals—we were the entirety of our social universe, for worse or for better. I’ve heard it said that siblings are the parallel lines of our lives, and for us the distance between those parallels is narrow. We did chores and homework together, and we played Diner Dash on a dinosaur of a computer monitor together. We created our own songs, games, and stories. In a way school never ended, and in a way it never began.

Since I was the oldest, there was a brief episode in our childhood when I was the leader, but as my younger siblings grew older and wiser I realized that my firm grip over our activities was slipping. But before they got wise, I made all the plans. One of those schemes was that, if our parents insisted on forcing us to do our own laundry for the foreseeable future, I would take my siblings when I turned seventeen and we would all run away to Florida. I was seven years old and reading The Boxcar Children at the time. The book cover shows four kids breaking into a boxcar, the oldest two guiding the younger two lovingly. The gentle kindness of the oldest sibling resonated with me, although I was just as likely to pull on my younger brother’s ear or antagonize him as I was to bring him to safety.

The plot of The Boxcar Children eludes me now, but I still remember the feeling I had when I read it, empathizing with the oldest brother and sister who tried to anticipate every challenge and find places for their small family to sleep and food for them to eat. This series formed a lethal mix in my mind with the other books I was reading at the time, The Left Behind series, an evangelical fantasy fiction about the rapture and the end times. It seemed certain to me that the antichrist would come to power, the world would fall into chaos, the atheists would attack, and I would have to find a way to keep my siblings safe. Survival skills never seemed more imminent than when I was seven years old.

Needless to say I never had to lead my siblings on foot across the country, but almost twenty years after I made that promise that we could be like The Boxcar Children and run away, I am roommates again with one of my sisters and my younger brother. There were days in our childhood when we stabbed each other with electrical cords, kicked each other, called each other stupid etc., but we have nevertheless still chosen to live together as adults. Maggie, Ben, and I are sharing an apartment in Detroit for a month, and then I will move out and back to Nashville to live with my partner. It is such a finite amount of time, which makes it even sweeter.

The very first week in Detroit, I walked around the city for several hours in ballet flats (ouch–the elementary school me who read Hatchet and watched Castaway would never make such a rookie mistake) to different places I had applied for a job. Since I would only be in the neighborhood for a month, I needed something very short term, but a gig that would still earn a decent amount of money. I had emailed twenty or so restaurants, cafes, and bars within walking distance of Maggie’s apartment and successfully set up interviews with three of them.

The first place I begged for employment was a hostel right around the corner. I met with the two managers, two millennial guys in Air Jordans and flat-brimmed hats who had inspiring words about Detroit. “The message that we try to spread, to everyone who walks through these doors, is that Detroit is truly a global city,” one man said earnestly, leaning against the doorframe, “a lot of tourists pass through and just see a lot of vacant land and abandoned houses, but what happens here impacts the entire world.” Then they explained that they could only offer me two shifts a week, at $14 per hour, and those shifts were mostly going to be on the weekends. The hostel was clean and well organized, and offered some fun activities on the weekends, but I couldn’t imagine being the only one on staff late at night in a creaky old house.

Next I walked through Corktown, past Comerica Park and the architecture studio where my sister works, to meet with the owner of a cafe near Wayne State University. The cafe was clean and filled with light. Local art hung on the walls with blinkworthy price tags attached, and the shelves held espresso beans, chocolate bars, and granola from Michigan companies. Two elderly couples sat at a table by the window, laughing over mugs of black coffee. The owner was a petite
brunette around my grandmother’s age. She ushered me into the conference room where she had printed out my resume, but since she was the only one working, she had to excuse herself every time that a new customer walked in. “We don’t have as much business as I would like, but I saw your resume and thought that we had to hire you,” she told me conspiratorially, after returning to her seat. “How does $10.25 an hour sound? If all goes well, next month, I could raise it to $10.75.” Dear reader, I tried to keep a straight face.I smiled, told her I would see her Monday for a training shift, and walked away feeling overwhelmed. If I worked ten hours at the hostel, and the twenty hours that the cafe owner had promised, I could maybe eke out $250 per week after taxes. My feet hurt from my fashionable yet regrettable decision to not wear tennis shoes, and the early summer sun beat down on me. I still had one more place to visit, but I felt the least optimistic about this one, because the managers had taken a long time to respond to me over email. I walked through downtown and Corktown, passing from the wide main roads to residential neighborhoods with charming old houses and plenty of trees.

This last place I went to beg for a job was a brewery with a giant patio and a pavilion. There was a wide stage in front of the outdoor seating, and cornhole and jenga blocks. I asked around for the name of the manager, and a server pointed me towards a woman wearing a tank top who was watering the flowers. She greeted me warmly and invited me inside. She asked me if I wanted anything to drink and poured herself a mug of beer. I may have overstated my knowledge about
brewing practices, and didn’t mention that I had no conception of what an IPA or a lager or a stout was (other than a vague notion of what color they were). She told me the pay, and once again, I had to try to keep a straight face, because it was much better than I had imagined. We scheduled a training shift, and I went back to my sister’s apartment feeling victorious.

The job at the brewery turned out to be better than I had anticipated. Not only were the managers as warm as they had seemed during the interview, but the entire team was friendly and patient. When I told two of my male coworkers with long hair and tattoos that I wasn’t sure what an IPA was, there was a frantic yet benign light that entered their eyes. They were only too happy to explain in detail the differences between an IPA, a lager, a stout, an amber, a porter.

At previous jobs in the food industry, the managers did not want employees to take food home at the end of the night. At the Detroit brewery, the kitchen was generous with food. After a huge catering event, the chef gave me several boxes of salmon, mac & cheese, sandwiches, and charcuterie meats and cheeses. Spreading out all of the food on the kitchen counter in front of my younger siblings that night, I had never felt more like the oldest brother in The Boxcar Children. “None of us are going hungry!” I exclaimed.

“We’re just like the Boxcar kids,” Maggie said. Then the three of us laughed even harder, because we were all adults and supposedly self-sufficient, and because Maggie calling us “kids” instead of “children,” made us sound like a rock band from the mid-aughts. In the following weeks I brought plenty more food home, and we watched movies with the projector on an old-fashioned canvas and easel, and Maggie and Ben introduced me to artists like Omar Apollo and Kevin Abstract. We watched Poor Things and were simultaneously shell-shocked and impressed. We went to see Challengers at the movie theater, which Maggie and I liked immediately, and Ben promptly explained was overrated as hell. We drove to Taco Bell at one in the morning for Cheez-it crunch wraps.

The only one we were missing was my sister Abbey, who works long hours as a tech coordinator at a theatre company. She creates the most beautiful projections for plays, and holds together all the plans for sound, lighting, and tech that are so essential to a performance. Thanks to her, a small local theatre company in a Michigan small town can successfully suspend the audience’s disbelief. One morning a few weeks earlier, I had sat in Abbey’s room with her while she worked on a puzzle and her cat tried to mess up the pieces. She told me about the theatre’s upcoming season. She had always been smiley and ready to sing and dance when she was a little kid, but now she enjoys working behind the scenes more.

Abbey showed me her projections on the walls of the theatre and gave me a tour backstage, showing me the giant paper maché mushrooms and colorful props for their performances of The Wizard of Oz. Maggie showed me the studio where she works and her favorite places in the city, pointing out the venues with the best DJs and the restaurants with the nicest patios in the summertime. We went to a Lana Del Rey themed techno night, and Ben sang and danced so fervidly that several girls came over and complimented him.

These moments were so important to me because, as it turned out, I didn’t keep my Boxcar Children promise. I was nothing like Henry James Alden. When I graduated from college, I left my hometown and traveled. I wanted to get out of Michigan more than anything, to escape what had always been familiar to me in search of the new. I did love using my survival skills; nothing was more exciting than when I didn’t know where I would sleep that night, where I was going, or how I would get there. Even though I don’t regret traveling and living abroad, I do regret missing so much time with my younger sisters and brother. There were a million moments across the world when I knew there were only three people who would understand me, who would laugh at the same things and enjoy the same nonsense.

In many ways we have grown up, and in many ways we haven’t changed at all. I am perhaps still just as dramatic as I was at seven years old. Sometimes when one of my siblings is telling a story or playing their instrument or quietly solving a puzzle, I look at them and think, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. My home state feels different now that I have left and returned. There are so many things I love about it that I took for granted growing up–the Great Lakes, the amazing food and music in Detroit, and the people most of all. I had dreamed of leading my siblings somewhere far away, but instead, all these years later, they guide me back home.

About The Artist:

Kaleigh Kuhns is a writer and educator. She is an avid reader and traveler who has been to seventeen countries. She believes in the power of literature to foster empathy and hope. You can find her book reviews and musings as @litnonsense on Instagram.