Sweet Pea
My family is…interesting. I have cattle rustlers even a city named after a family member on a couple of branches of my tree. Anyway, I’m not sure where it started, but my dad’s dad (Pappy, no really, Pappy) always had a name for you if he liked you, especially if you were family. It sometimes makes it hard to keep up with a conversation if you’re not on the inside, hearing Jimmy Crow and Ricochet Rabbit this, and Cly Cly and The Redhead that.
Well both of Pappy’s kids have picked up this habit, one of them being my Aunt Sharon. (For those playing along at home, that makes the other one my dad.) A note about her: Aunt Sharon was awesome. She let me ride her big dogs when I was small, and her horses when I was less small, and she let me eat Pop-Tarts and she got me a Speak N Spell to play with when I was visiting her. Every year for Christmas she got us gifts we got to open early: Christmas ornaments! She had curly hair like me, and a gap between her front teeth like me, and I always thought somehow my parents knew that would happen when they gave me her middle name, so we’d always be (what I like to call) extra-related. Now back to the story.
Aunt Sharon called her husband (whose name is Dean) Ralph, for reasons I never had explained to me. I just went with it. She called almost everyone something. And by “called them something” I really mean addressed cards to you, wrote it on gift tags, all that kind of stuff. It was like you checked your “outside” name at the door and the rest of the time you were the name she had given you.
She called me Sweet Pea. Like the baby in the Popeye cartoons.
“But Kelly”, you say, “what do you mean callED you Sweet Pea?”
She passed away a few years ago. She had cancer she was not able to beat the second time around. She was so full of life when she was alive and driving around in her green Corvette with the yellow pinstripe and the little Minnie Mouse near the back window, it was hard to lose her. And hard to lose my nickname too.
Then a couple of years ago I got to know someone I wrote on a group blog with. She was fun and smart and all around cool.
Once after being at her house I was leaving and she gave me a hug and said “Goodbye, sweet pea. See you later.” It was back! And from a completely other random source who didn’t know this story!
That’s how I knew this was someone I was destined to be friends with.
It’s not like she has officially dubbed me “Sweet Pea”, either. Sometimes it’s “Sweetie”, sometimes it’s just Kelly. But every so often it’s like I get a little happy reminder of someone I love, and I get the same sort of warm fuzzy feeling I get from an unexpected hug or other act of kindness.
She doesn’t know this story. (Well she does now.) And I hope she enjoys hearing the story half as much as I enjoy hearing my “name”.
2 Responses to “Sweet Pea”
camikaos says:
August 6, 2009 at 12:06 pm
<3
Kristine Laird-Abplanalp says:
August 20, 2009 at 11:54 am
Aunt Sharon…I miss her. I was always Frissy. To this day I don’t know why. She really was full of life. And yes, you did look just like her. “Extra related” I like that.