<p>The prompt was: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?</p>
<p>And here’s the essay:</p>
<p>Propped up on the right side of my hip, my two year old cousin is crying and gently pressing her forehead into my neck – a strange thing to do to the person who won’t let her bounce on the trampoline with her sisters. As far as her reasoning goes, I must be the enemy. I have my reason, though: She is tiny. The trampoline is too high off the ground, and the other girls are bouncing too much. She’ll fall off of it. She doesn’t realize this, and I doubt she’d care if she did. So she cries.</p>
<p>The youngest [mylastname] girls are just not blessed with skill on the trampoline. It’s true. Not even a week earlier, I found myself carrying another cousin, Kate, into the house after she sprained her ankle on it. Now, Kate’s a bit hard for me to carry, seeing as she’s about seven and a half and (admittedly) gaining on me in height. So carrying her to the house ended up being a long and difficult process, with my socks getting soaked through because I had to walk through the mud without shoes. I didn’t mind.</p>
<p>There’s something intrinsic about being with my family, especially the younger side – even if I do end up having to walk through the mud. We all have roles in my family, and carrying my cousins up the porch steps, that’s part of mine. Getting toys out of the dog’s mouth, that’s part of it. Watering down politics to a curious eleven-year-old, that’s another part. Driving her to the mall, coughing to censor the cuss words on the radio, that’s another part of my role. And it happens to be my favorite role.</p>
<p>I was never given the younger sibling I asked for as a child, but my younger cousins are close enough. I get to be the teacher, the chaperone, the human bumper on the playground, the older sister who keeps bugging everyone to do the right thing. Being with my family, wherever they may happen to be, means knowing my role perfectly. There are no questions. I don’t have to ask which foods my gluten-free cousin is allowed to eat like I have to ask how to differentiate an inverse function. All I have to worry about is keeping Kate from spraining her ankle on the trampoline for a fourth time, not about getting that research paper in on time and having a presentation finished and ready to go by Monday. I stop being intimidated by what I don’t know because I get to focus on what I do know whenever I’m asked for homework help. Cooking dinner for a waiting seven-year-old is far easier than building a physics project.</p>
<p>These responsibilities all have weight; and it’s weight I’m perfectly glad to carry. I’m glad to be the babysitter. I’m glad to be the kitchen-helper. I’m glad to be the older sister.</p>
<p>I’m even glad to be the human net when my youngest cousin eventually gets her way and ends up jumping on the trampoline. She giggles and stumbles around the whole time, but you can bet she doesn’t fall.</p>