Olderbrother: Hand Me Down
Penny peers out her bedroom window on the second floor of her family’s creaky old farmhouse, chin resting on folded arms in wait.
It’s a nippy, sunless day in their little corner of Nowhere.
She sits watching clouds of every gray billow above a mud-pit landscape dotted with pointed evergreens and the occasional skittering herd of deer. After what felt to Penny hours, the sputter of her older brother’s rusting yellow hatchback’s engine interrupts the great silence unique to Nowhere to make the turn onto their deeply rutted gravel driveway.
Penny had been anxiously awaiting Joe’s return from the City. She missed having her older brother around, even if he was most adept at teasing her and not always interested in the weird science experiments she concocted to understand their Nowhere top to bottom. Joe was a writer. When he wasn’t exploring with Penny — who was most often found covered in mud or grass stains with a tuft of goat hair in one hand and measuring tape, maybe, in the other — he wrote his dreams of the City or Somewhere Else.
Joe’s room, once a topographical map of books, offered testament to his knack for knowing things. There weren’t many subjects that escaped his thorough consideration, and Penny sensed his absence most profoundly when she was met with a question she was sure her older brother would have just the right source book to cure her curiosity. Penny remembered how, on moving day, her older brother’s hatchback was so crammed with his collection that there seemed barely any room left for him. In his absence, she had taken to sitting on his bed and rummaging through what scant books of his library remained, hoping to find there some hint of Joe’s sage direction. Now that he was finally back from the City, perhaps she could ask him if the pocket-sized paperback poetry books she found in his room could really be called poetry when they never rhymed. She was sure that’d get him going for a while.
Joe was the sort to satisfy his need to know some of a lot of places and things by retreating into his vast assemblage of those recorded thoughts of history’s great thinkers. Penny was the sort to want to know everything of what surrounded her by digging around, picking unfamiliar flowers or sloshing through a new swath of mud just past a stream she’d never before crossed. It was a good temperament for a girl from Nowhere.
Upon his return to the creaky old farmhouse, Joe brought with him evidence of his new life in the City: an elegant watch without numbers on its face, an automatic coffeemaker for Mom that, he promised, would rouse her from the deepest coma with the wafting aroma of a perfectly brewed pot, the cleanest pair of brown leather shoes Penny had seen to date and a tiny, black, bound book packed with appointments. The point of a watch without numbers was lost on Penny, and she worried that appointment book might be keeping her older brother too busy to properly enjoy himself. He spoke of big buildings of ornate stonework, art museums that boasted canvasses splattered with paint by this or that genius, and not subtly hinted at the nature of his accompaniment.
While it pleased her to hear of Joe’s satisfaction with his bustling City-life, still Penny couldn’t help but worry her older brother had forgotten the tactile pleasures of squelching mud beneath a boot or even brewing his own cup of coffee. Her older brother’s new life in the City was defined by hurry, the necessity of being on time. Convenience and clean lines, the City sounded to Penny a place of uniformity and undue expectations, but it was a thrill to simply hear his voice again. Even when it was used for his patented teasing techniques.
At the dinner table on the third night of Joe’s return, he took notice of Penny’s deep blue button down, a calm sea of low purple shades and dark blue tones. “Is that my old shirt?” Joe asked, certain before Penny could answer. “It is! I’ve been wearing it a lot since you left. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind, but why would you want to wear an old shirt? Is Mom waiting for you to stop growing out of everything she buys you after a week before getting you your own?” Joe always knew just how to ruffle her feathers.
“No way, Joe! I just… I just like the way it feels. Like it’s been lived in a little...” Penny was embarrassed to add, “... by you,” muttering the addendum under her breath.
She hated being sappy, but it was the truth of the matter. While Joe was off in the City learning how to read the time on a watch without numbers to get to all those tiny-book appointments on time, Penny missed his teasing her for always being covered in soot and sod. She missed hearing him read his latest dreams of the City or Somewhere Else, his sage direction on what her explorations in her endless Nowhere meant. That old button down was her relic of him. Penny appreciated the old shirt’s warmth, familiarity and that it took the shape of her absent older brother’s shoulders. When she wore it, she could smell books, high school boy’s deodorant and could close her eyes and channel her older brother’s face forming some thought on her topic of inquiry she had yet to think of in just that way.
Though Penny had trailed off, Joe took her meaning. “You know, I’m sure I’ve got a couple other cool things hiding around here you could have.” He held real eye contact with his little sister for the first time since arriving back on the farm and gave her the most meaningful smile he could muster from across the dinner table.
Oddly enough, what his younger sister had left unsaid allowed him to reckon, for the first time, with the effect of his absence on the muddy landscape of Nowhere. In that moment, he remembered that Penny had gone on trudging without him, she had probably had questions left unanswered, Mom had been keeping up the chores without his help, that Nowhere was still there when he wasn’t. His inadvertent Hand-Me-Down had provided some comfort to his younger sister that her older brother was still thinking of her, still aware of her need for his sage direction, still writing his dreams of the City or Somewhere Else. It was then that older brother Joe resolved to never forget his place where he’s not, to cherish the memories of whom and to whom he has been, and to consciously hold them wherever he may find himself. Now, he reasoned, might not be the best time to tease Penny.