Practical Magic

I feel like I spend many of my days dealing in the business of broken hearts. Sometimes it's a true love shattered at 12. Sometimes it's a student who's been called an awful name. Sometimes it's a parent recently deported. I often find myself without the right words or tools to fix these hearts. I offer what love I can, and hope it's enough to get them through that day.

Tonight I found myself at my sister's, pouring out my own recent heartbreak. During the course of the evening, we started reminiscing about childhood. A story came up about my youngest sister. She had a few unique habits that still reduce her older sisters to hysterical laughter. For instance, she loved to get Mom's cinnamon tic-tacs, eat them until they got too hot for her two-year-old mouth, and then spit them out. More times than we could count there would be a trail of half-eaten candy down the hallway.

One of her other habits had to do with injuries. She loved band-aids, loved wearing them, putting them on her dolls, and decorating with them. Our other sister reminded me that we always had to have the plain ones because Mom couldn't afford to keep the cartoon ones in stock.

My mom also had this really amazing spray that had an anesthetic in it. It was a miracle on cuts, burns, and scrapes. We called it the "magic spray." Often, our youngest sister would pretend to be injured. Mom or I would put her up on the counter, where we would notice nothing was wrong. She would be crying real tears and insist on the "magic spray." We learned to grab the bottle, make the hissing sound with our mouths, put on a beloved band-aid, and kiss the "injured" spot. She would wipe her tears away, kiss us on the cheek, say a quick "I love you", and return to playing.

For a brief moment, I wished there was a "magic spray" for our grown-up injuries. They seem to cut deeper and take longer to heal. But even as we told the story, I received a sweet text message from a close friend, and my sister continued to make me laugh. I suddenly realized with relief that the magic was never in the spray.