My Little Sister

I am the youngest of 13 children. However, I will forever have a baby sister. Her name was Dixie and although she was born eleven years before me, she will always remain a toddler.
She passed away when she was not quite two, and all I have to know her by are the few pictures of a toddler. My brother, Leo, wrote about Dixie on his blog and I found it interesting to find that his remembrances and the story that my mother told me several times were very much the same, but also different. Memories can be like that. Here is my version of the story as told to me by my mother. It is actually an essay I wrote for an English class in college. I had to write about things from my past that affected me today.

One of my most profund memories really wasnt about something that happened to me. It happened to someone else, but the telling of it to me many times left me feeling as though I was a big part of it and it left me with some very strong feelings. It is a story of a little girl -
Dixie Rose. The time was 1942. It was shorty after the depression era and times were hard. She was born into a farm family - the eighth child. First there were two boys to help their father on the farm, then a girl to help the mother with the household chores, then came four boys in a row to help around the farm with the lighter chores and to frolic through the yard, then came Dixie Rose. After this string of frisky boys, Dixie Rose was a delight to them all. A tiny little girl with white-blonde hair, she was adored by the whole family. In the fall of 1941, the family finally realized their dream of buying their own farm - a place of their own for the first time. On Halloween, the family moved into their new home, leaving dear friends and neighbors behind about ten miles away. Not a long way by today's standards, but back then it was a considerable distance. Everyone was so busy trying to make a living that there wasn't a lot of time for visiting. Thanksgiving came and went and the family was very grateful for the blessings they had received that year. Christmas came and although the children didn't receive a lot, they were happy with the trinkets Santa brought to them. Her mother remembered the children waking up in the early orning and running down the stairs to see what Santa had left. Dixie Rose had received a box of little tin dishes, and she was thrilled with them. She couldn't wait to take them to show Mommy and Daddy, and her tiny little 22 month old legs slowly and carefully carried the little box of tin dishes up the stairs to show them, bumping the box on each step. Her Mom laid in bed and listened to the clink-clink as the little dishes rattled in their box with each step. On January 2nd, the family was surprised by a visit from the next door neighbors they had left behind a few months before. Mom was overjoyed to see her friend, and Mary, the older daughter was just as happy to see her dear friend from the past. They had lunch and the two women were cleaning up dishes and making things neat. Mom told Mary to take Dixie Rose and the next youngest, Leo - who was four - up to their beds to take an afternoon nap. I never knew why Dixie Rose wasn't in her bed. Did Mary in her eleven year old excitement of seeing her friend forget to put her into the bed or did Dixie Rose at 22 months figure out how to get out? Anyway, she and Leo decied to explore a little. Dixie Rose climbed up onto a chair and found a box of matches that had been left on a dresser. The house had no electricity yet and the family had to depend on oil lamps for light. Dixie Rose began to play with the matches and figured out how to light them. She would light one and then hold it down for Leo, who was standing on the floor, to blow it out. But suddenly the flame from the match caught at the hem of the little nightgown, and in the days before inflammable materials, the little nightgown flared instantly. The mother heard the child scream and went running up the stairs, and as she turned the corner at the top of the stairs she saw her precious child coming down the hall towards her - covered in flames. She grabbed the child and put the flames out and they rushed her to the hospital, but the child was seriously burned. Mother stayed with her for many hours, but there were seven more children at home and farm chores to be done. The nurses at the hospital assured her that Dixie Rose would be OK until morning and urged her to go home to her other children and to get some rest. So the mother did. Before she went to bed, she had a strong desire to call the hospital and check on Dixie Rose, but she was afraid she would be a bother to the nurses and she knew they were busy. So she went to bed and tried to sleep. In the night, the phone rang, and the nurses at the hospital told the mother that her precious little girl had died.

This story was told to me many times as a child. You see, Dixie Rose was my sister, a sister I never knew. She died nine years before I was born. To me, she was a small child in a handful of pictures we had of her. She was always the "little " sister, even though she had been born several years before me.

I was afraid of matches. I lit my first match when I was sixteen, and even then, I was afraid.

My mother told me to be careful what I wished for in life. Many times she said that because Dixie Rose was so sweet and adorable she had wished she didn't have to grow up, and she didn't.

One time my mother and I were having a conversation about a girl I knew from high school who had gone out and partied and came home after drinking and went to sleep. Her baby spit up during the night and choked and died. My mother said she felt sorry for that mother, that even though it was an accident, she would never forgive herself. I knew when Mom was saying that, that she was talking about herself and Dixie Rose.