Why halfway down?
There is a poem by A. A. Milne, which we can reproduce here in its entirety because it was published in 1924 and so now it's in the public domain.
“Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn’t any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.
Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up
And isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery,
It isn’t in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!”
We are especially partial to the Muppet version.
We do like sitting on the stairs, but also we think the song is a delightful expression of what it's like to be us. Maybe you can relate, also, but for us where it begins is this:
We are twins.
No, we don't have our own language. We just used to speak so quickly that new family friends once asked if we were speaking Japanese. We still speed up when we are excited, or relaxed, or simply comfortable with people we trust.
As twins do, we have lots of other little shared quirks, developed through formative years spent together. We can disguise them, somewhat, but we cannot turn them off. People who love us find us delightful. People who are looking for an excuse to dislike us can always find something.
Is this a universal twin thing, or is it an everyone thing, or is it just us? Yes, probably.
Twins, especially identical twins, are always a little bit in between. We grew up in our own tiny culture, made up of just two people. Still, we suspect that this is a feeling that everyone has, at least sometimes.
Imagine that we are sitting on the steps together, listening to the adults converse in the kitchen and the kids play in the basement. We might go down. We might go up. In the meantime, we are learning an awful lot about what is going on in this house.
We are the living embodiment of the Lutheran both/and. We love to answer "yes" to either/or questions. We actually believed it when they told us that we were both sinners and saints.
One of us majored in physics and the other in political science. One of us is a deacon and one of us is a pastor. One of is single, like she always wanted to be, and the other is married, like she always wanted to be. One of us has a child and the other is the best aunt in the world.
None of these are actually two contrasting things, although you might have to be a twin to understand that.
We were literally baptized, confirmed, ordained, and (in one case) married in the ELCA, but as first-generation Lutherans, we are still not quite insiders.
We like languages, and birds, and sewing, and birds, and music, and journaling, and writing, and birds. If you haven't figured out which one of us wrote this part yet, that's because I asked the birds to write it for me, probably.
Why not halfway up?
We are two women, and we are doing theology. We insist that even if we are talking about birds, or sewing, we are really also doing theology.
There are those who will say that we are going straight to hell for that. No, not the birds part, the doing theology while female part. What's worse, if you are reading this, then we are bringing you with us. We're halfway there already.
…so we figured we’d save them the trouble. Now that it’s been said, we can talk about something more interesting.
Text art by Erin