Sheba is my sister. She’s older, but we’ve never noticed. We always stayed up late together and laughed until we cried before she moved out. When she left, I saved up all my funny stories and told them to myself until she’d come home one weekend, full of her own funny stories.
She is warm and womanly. Her hair is curly the way a child draws curls and her smile is smiley the way a child draws smiles. She is beautiful, everyone always says so, and they’re right. She is the sort of beauty that has it’s own theme song in high school when she’d walk down the halls, but as a woman now looks best in a wonderful apron on a spring day with all the windows open and a curl in the centre of her forehead and two rosy circles for cheeks, just like a child would draw.
Sheba bakes beautiful things and they’re always moist and light, never dense and tacky the way my loaves can be. Sheba’s loaves rise in the centre and stay risen. She followed recipes until she got so good that recipes started to follow Sheba. She stores things properly so they stay moist but she doesn’t need to because nothing she bakes lasts long.
She is tall and stately and bursts through every doorway with great energy, like the Kool-aid man, only way hotter. Sheba is fun. She has silly ideas and she actually follows through with most of them even when they cost money and take time. She loves to laugh, and her laugh is a good one–it sounds like it rises out of her belly like a great big bubble of HA that pops in her mouth and dulls to a fizz in her shiny eyes. She has tiny porcelain hands and wrists and gloriously fleshy breasts and it really does suit her, that contrast. Sheba could be 500 pounds and she would still have a flat stomach, it’s a modern marvel, and everyone would hate her for it if they didn’t like her so darn much.
Her daughter has her eyes and we don’t know where they came from because they’re very particular. She doesn’t have my mother or my father’s eyes, I think she must have invented them entirely for her own use before she came to earth. They are originals. They are Sheba’s eyes. It’s hard to describe them, but when you look into them you feel her keen curiosity–she’s got eyes like a cat sitting in a window full of sparrows. Her nose is bird like and very fine and speaks of her Persian ancestry. She used to hate it when she was young and spoke of getting a nose job. Me and everyone else are glad she didn’t because her nose is very fine and when she turns to the side she looks like the girls in roman paintings.
Sheba loves to help and loves to love and wants everything and everyone to be okay and fed and comfortable all the time, except herself. If you’re for any reason hungry or uncomfortable, even if she is not within proximity, it is her fault and she must remedy it. You will receive a loaf and some rain boots in the mail, direct post.
When we were very little, maybe I was nine and she would have been thirteen, she turned to me in the back of my mother’s Mercedes Benz station wagon and said “I used to be jealous of you but I like you now and I’m going to be nice to you from now on”. My little world changed that day.
Even at nine years old, I understood that Sheba shouldn’t be jealous of anyone. She holds all the light and the love and the beauty within her she could ever need, and with plenty to spare. I should know, I’ve been the recipient of much of the glowing overflow for thirty-something years. And I’m better for it.
Sheba
About Me
A poet living in Ontario. Mostly works of memoir and poetry that focus on motherhood, womanhood, and relationship to self.
The Offline Mind 
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