We called them the weird sisters but that had nothing to do with destiny. If you google “weird” now you get origins in “wyrd” and references to the Greek fates and the Scottish witches, but they and we doubt it. The weird sisters looked the word up when we were younger and dictionaries were printed on paper.

Weird came from “we-ïrd” then. Short for “way-ward.” That made sense. It agreed with our “not in the mainstream” understanding of the word. Even Shakespeare referred to his Macbeth crones as “weyard.” But the wayward meaning has now been swamped out of Internet search engines.

Our weird sisters are not old or ugly or triplets. They share no vital organs. They are three white suburban siblings, the only children of lower middle class parents, and they were born two years and two months apart, dropped like cabbages by their fertile mother, into the barnyard of our little society. Jane, Jude, and Jem.

Their mother had dark blonde hair and their dad was a redhead. The daughters have varying shades of strawberry blonde waves around narrow faces with nice eyes, generous noses and thinnish lips. Jane has slightly prominent ears. Judith’s notable feature is a rack of standup breasts. Jemima needs glasses for astigmatism.

Their parents are Jenny and Jack. Their pets are Jazzy and Jiggles. The family is brought to you by the letter J. That’s a little odd, but not so weird. Jenny changed her name from Leilani. Jack was originally Jason.

The sisters have always been close. They were near enough in age to go through all the sibling battles and reconciliations necessary to create intimacy and they happened to have opinions and interests different enough that they never had to engage in competition about favorite subjects or favored dates. They made it to the ages of 35, 33 and 31 before any of us tried to write them up.

Maybe they wouldn’t have been quite as weird if they were raised elsewhere and by other parents. Our little CDP isn’t a real community, our school didn’t have enough kids to provide real diversity, and the Jacksons were among our strangest neighbors. It wasn’t that odd, then and here, for a family to have no visible means of adequate support – there was always a component of the population involved in extra-legal entrepreneurship – but the tattoo-inscribed culture the Jacksons worked to create/describe, complete with the renegade Ja-Mule “army” they founded (going as strong as it ever did after 20 years of recruitment, with its six dozen members) created an unusual environment for the sisters to inhabit.

Jane and Jude and Jem attended school but not whole-heartedly. They were all early and good readers, and they seemed to obtain most of their education on their own. Along the way they acquired odd attitudes too. Like Jane refusing to accept the notion that time is the fourth dimension. She was the sister most apt at math/science, but she dug in her heels like a fundamentalist about adding time to the spacial three. Jude grew into such a sincere vegetarian that she offered brussel sprouts to trick-or-treaters (their house was regularly toilet-papered on Halloween). And little Jemima became the champion of garden snails. Something about the molluscs fascinated her from the age of five. Her passion grew to include slugs and other pseudopods. Maybe it was all about home climate; snails were rare in our native aridity, and therefore precious.