anti:freeze

I called my sister yesterday, and I was reminded of how much her children have changed her, how, in the three years since I left Iowa, she has gone from a major in visual art to deaf interpretation, helping her husband and three kids get fluent in a language I barely know.

Her voice was raspy, a little muted as if she were lying down and balancing the receiver on her ear, the mouthpiece not quite in front of her lips. In highschool she sometimes talked that way when she was watching television and her boyfriend called. She was usually less interested in him than the sit-com.

"Sounds like you've got a cold," I said.

"Can you hold on?" She said. "I have to get my glasses."

Her glasses? To talk on the phone? I thought about this while I listened to my nephews play in the background. Elijah was screaming; Gabriel laughing. I imagined them ramming toy tractors into the furniture. You don't need to see in order to talk on the phone, I thought. No gestures, no tiny menu typeface, no pictures pulled from a wallet.

Then I heard my sister correcting Elijah's sign language. "Your fingers go like this," she said. "See?" She annunciated each syllable slowly, so he could easily read her lips.

Both my nephews are deaf or hard of hearing, and one communicates mostly through sign language. As a result, my sister has dedicated her life to deaf culture - with a passion I haven't seen since she studied ballet. She's resisting intense pressure from doctors, teachers, and other parents to put her kids under the knife for what she sees as the ultimate cosmetic surgery: having devices surgically implanted in their heads so they can hear. She wants her kids to be who they are, to make their own decisions about body and life-altering surgeries. That, and she doesn't think there's anything to fix.

I love this about her, how her children's challenges have become her own, as she advocates for them at school and gets certified in deaf interpretation. I love, too, how all the articulations she learned in ballet are coming back to her - an entire language in joints and muscle. So much meaning in a bent pinkie, a pointed finger.

Thinking back, the glasses make sense to me. For her, talking has transformed into a visual art, even when she's on the telephone and can't see the person on the other end of the wire. In this way, she is still studying dance, still practicing drawing and painting - just in the air instead of on canvas. Maybe not everything has changed.