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I grew up in Stark County, Ohio, an on-the-nose name in that most Ohio children count gray and overcast among their first spoken words. I remember seeing my first North Carolina sky when I was 18 and thought God had been quite stingy by withholding this kind of show-off splendor from the Ohio folks.
I stared up into its creamy blueness and knew then that I wanted to spend my life under its – what was that, cobalt? Lapis? Azure? – skies. It felt substantial, like it was up to the job of supervision and protection.
I only chanced to see that sky because my childhood pastor encouraged me to apply to Milligan College in Johnson City, Tenn. His daughter was to be a senior, and it was understood that she would look after me, as it would be the first time in my life that to venture into the world without my twin.
Singletons don’t think about things like that. They’ve been going it alone since their first day in kindergarten. But twins have never been alone, not even in the womb, and we’ve been happily stuck together ever since.
No first-day jitters for us in grade school because we entered the classroom hand in hand. No insecurities about not fitting in during high school. We fit together just fine.
I mean, there was that one time when we were 15 and she got me fired from my summer job as a strawberry picker. I was the second-top picker in the fields that season, bested only by Lori Gang, which shouldn’t count because she was a strawberry-picking savant.
When my sister, bored with her baby-sitting job, begged me to pull the old twin-switcheroo, something we did all the time in school, she replaced me in the fields. But she was a lousy picker and when I returned the following week, I was sacked for poor performance.
And still, we clung together, experiencing the world in our twin way, together. Some people thought we were too close.
“It’s not healthy how those Blythe twins are so close,” I once heard a church mom say. This was a portent, and I should have paid attention.
When it came time for college, the adults in our lives convinced us to attend different schools, which is what brought me to Milligan College, alone. We hated being apart.
My sister was homecoming queen our senior year in high school, and we had an 8x10 framed photo of her all dressed up wearing her crown. I carried that photo with me the whole first semester. I treated everybody – and I mean everybody – I met to a viewing of that picture. “You can’t really know me if you don’t know her,” I used to say, waving it in their faces.
I later learned that many of them thought I was showing them a picture of myself. This, of course, earned me membership into the freak club, which, it turns out, is a “Hotel California”-type situation. Once you check into, you’re a lifetime member. We talked every Saturday from the pay phone at the end of our respective dorm hallways, but we both walked around with an ache in the shape of twin sister.
The pastor’s daughter
encouraged me to try out for Show Choir, which toured around the region as a marketing arm for the college, which is how I saw my first North Carolina sky. We left the college really early that morning, before sunrise, and most of the group had dozed off by the time we got into North Carolina.
But I was wide awake, missing my sister, when the sun began to softly wake up the landscape. I watched the blurry details of the brown sugar earth and hilly meadows become sharp and clear as the light moved from dim to bright. Then, suddenly, there was that sky, flirty and delicious, and I was undone. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was home.
All these years later, my sister and I both live under its watchful protection. I don’t even know if she recognizes she’s doing it, but she always has a quart of strawberries in her fridge when I come to visit, I guess as penance. (Rightfully so, as I loved that job.)
On occasion, we visit Ohio and have grown to the love flat farmlands and water paint clouds. But the joy always comes in the return trip. We hardly need the highway signs to welcome us back to North Carolina. That darling, bold sky ushers us in, with its beaming, “Welcome back, twins, you’re home.”
Abigail Blythe Batton is a staff correspondent for the Cherokee Scout. Her column runs every other week. Email her at ablythebatton@gmail.com or leave a message at 837-5122.