Tally-Marks

While other family had mother-enforced house rules, Sarah acted as our family organizer. Decorating the refrigerator with endless charts, Sarah assigned point values to various chores: carrying haybales to the ponies: 2 points, topping off water: 1 point, doing a stall, 3 points. After reaching 100 tally-marks, you wouldn’t work until the others matched your score. Sarah, smarter than us all, would secretly hoard her tally-marks, then dramatically mark them all at once, marking her time of leisure until Libby and I grudgingly caught up. At moments like these, my parents should have guessed Sarah would end up at Yale.