Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2002-03-24 02:08 am
azurelunatic) wrote2002-03-24 02:08 am
Twerpair
Learning to speak Joanie is almost a college level course. I was not raised with mainstream America. I did not have any My Little Ponies. No TV. No pop music until I was 15.
I had a sister, though, Narcissa (biosis), and together we spoke almost our own language. Not so much new words and grammar (although there were a few of those) but the history, the vast density of stories and legends and truisms behind the words, as much as readers of the same body of literature can make literary allusions with a few casual words and speak volumes to those who have read the same books and know them well.
We also had chickens, and it was from them I learned what happens to those who are "different" -- how murderously vicious a pecking order can be -- and also what true loyalty is -- when someone has made your sister squawk, you leap up and hang onto the offender with your beak and your claws, screaming bloody murder the whole time, never mind that the offender is easily a hundred times your size (two pound chicken, 250 pound adult human). From them also, I learned the strength of the twerpair.
Twerpair, the name, evolved from the breed of chicken Belgian Antwerp Quail. Cute little banties with fuzzyfeathered faces, looking more Dr. Seuss than something that should be running around the yard scratching and occasionally laying dainty little eggs. We called them Twerps. We had two of them, sisters, almost identical. They were raised by themselves together before we let them loose with the other chickens, so they stuck together from day one. Their brooder, a giant grey fluff named Chickabird, went with the rest of the brood over to a friend's birdyard, so our twerps were on their own, with just each other for company until they met the rest of the chickens. In retrospect, I see how that paralleled my sister's and my development, with little to no contact with other children our same age until we reached school age, and then, very little socializing outside of school.... but the Twerps had evolved a strong bond of sisterhood. Where one went, the other went. When one felt lousy, the other one stuck by her side. Where one roosted, her sister did too.
Narcissa and I called the phenomenon, and the birdies, a twerpair, a pair of twerps. The word came to be applied to any close, loyal friendship of the form "where one is, so is the other."
Twerpairs don't long stay apart from each other in death. When a dog carried off Swallowtail, the rounder of the two, it was only a few months before Nutty Brownie, the smaller and darker-marked twerp, was found drowned in the washtub that the geese swam in. My mother's theory was that Nutty had perched on the edge to get a drink and had fallen in, and had been too weak to flap out, citing Nutty's recent ill health and general shakiness. I'm not so sure about that myself.
You can practically read each other's minds in a twerpair. There is much harmony, and it comes relatively naturally: it's not a stress to avoid offending/pissing off/upsetting the other. Born on the same day, to the same foster mother, to the same environment. Thinking the same. Feeling the same. To a degree, looking the same.
I had a sister, though, Narcissa (biosis), and together we spoke almost our own language. Not so much new words and grammar (although there were a few of those) but the history, the vast density of stories and legends and truisms behind the words, as much as readers of the same body of literature can make literary allusions with a few casual words and speak volumes to those who have read the same books and know them well.
We also had chickens, and it was from them I learned what happens to those who are "different" -- how murderously vicious a pecking order can be -- and also what true loyalty is -- when someone has made your sister squawk, you leap up and hang onto the offender with your beak and your claws, screaming bloody murder the whole time, never mind that the offender is easily a hundred times your size (two pound chicken, 250 pound adult human). From them also, I learned the strength of the twerpair.
Twerpair, the name, evolved from the breed of chicken Belgian Antwerp Quail. Cute little banties with fuzzyfeathered faces, looking more Dr. Seuss than something that should be running around the yard scratching and occasionally laying dainty little eggs. We called them Twerps. We had two of them, sisters, almost identical. They were raised by themselves together before we let them loose with the other chickens, so they stuck together from day one. Their brooder, a giant grey fluff named Chickabird, went with the rest of the brood over to a friend's birdyard, so our twerps were on their own, with just each other for company until they met the rest of the chickens. In retrospect, I see how that paralleled my sister's and my development, with little to no contact with other children our same age until we reached school age, and then, very little socializing outside of school.... but the Twerps had evolved a strong bond of sisterhood. Where one went, the other went. When one felt lousy, the other one stuck by her side. Where one roosted, her sister did too.
Narcissa and I called the phenomenon, and the birdies, a twerpair, a pair of twerps. The word came to be applied to any close, loyal friendship of the form "where one is, so is the other."
Twerpairs don't long stay apart from each other in death. When a dog carried off Swallowtail, the rounder of the two, it was only a few months before Nutty Brownie, the smaller and darker-marked twerp, was found drowned in the washtub that the geese swam in. My mother's theory was that Nutty had perched on the edge to get a drink and had fallen in, and had been too weak to flap out, citing Nutty's recent ill health and general shakiness. I'm not so sure about that myself.
You can practically read each other's minds in a twerpair. There is much harmony, and it comes relatively naturally: it's not a stress to avoid offending/pissing off/upsetting the other. Born on the same day, to the same foster mother, to the same environment. Thinking the same. Feeling the same. To a degree, looking the same.