Sisters, Friends and Sisters Again

          

Sisters, Friends and Sisters Again

          They come into your life before you arrive, waiting to hold you, to bath you and coo back at your smiles.  Big sisters are a brilliant creation.  I applaud their appearance.  Mine made white divinity candy with fresh hen eggs, lots of sugar and walnuts, magic came in the gingerbread houses with lots of frosting, cookies squeezed in pinwheel flowers with green and red sugar sprinkles.

I am told that I embarrassed this older sister with my helpfulness, running out of a bedroom with her falsies for her bra in my hands in front of her date for the evening, calling out to her as I ran to her.”Sissy, you forgot these.”  She was my older sister by twelve years, I think. She has been gone for too many years but her love was left with us for an eternity.

          My younger sister came into the world so I would have a playmate who understood the world of playing with dollies, running for no reason and hiding in the big wooden box in the closet of the room that became our room after our older sister married and move away.

She was the sister that shared the bed in the cold of the winter with frost on the inside of the windows where our breaths which had been escaping from our lungs through twin air pockets in our blankets landed as moisture sweeping the window panes ending up as the exquisite beauty of frosty ice landscapes. We huddled tight together beneath the heavy quilts made by our mother, grandmother and aunts in an unheated room until morning broke with the darkness holding on. One by one we would streak from the warmth of our bed into the icy air of our breathing in the early morning in those years of living on river. Dad would have a fire burning in the big wood stove to warm our bodies as we dressed. It was a time of utter freedom and no cares in the world or so it seemed as we grew on the wild mountain filled with the icy cold, deep snow sleeping against our log cabin in long winters. Spring, summer would come while my sister and I grew.

I believe that I might have had the warmest tummy that cold feet could rest on. The proof lies from past experience with my younger sister’s feet to one of my favorite cousin who in her youth could twist and turn until her cold feet rested safely on my tummy.  I hope that my cousin wears nice fuzzy socks since I am miles and miles away from her.

Days, months, years passed until as sisters and family do we began to have separate lives, holding secrets that we never shared, losing touch with each other lives. We move out into the world.

          I found out that sisters appear without warning which makes you grab yourself with excitement as when I received an email saying, “I have information about your siblings.” I felt completely uncertain about meeting these siblings but finding common ground provided relief and joy in seeing someone who looked like me even though I was greatly loved in my adopted family.  Adoption is quirky you never know what you get but when a new sister finds you and loves you for the same blood that flows though you, you accept the newness, the learning about someone new who has always been there  just a world away.

          I became a friend with this new sister until I loved her with all my heart and cherish her each day. She is another older sister with much of her life behind her. I amazed and grateful that she is a very solid woman and it has become a joy to get to know her.  She turned out to be very protective and would only let some of her/my family know of me. 

A great gift is another younger sister whom I am still getting to know. I will always cherish one of my visits where my younger sister and I played dress up in our older sister’s black party beaded chiffon dresses with lots of costume jewelry adorning our bodies.  While on the back wooden porch that ringed my sister’s house among the pines, my younger sibling painted my toes and fingernails while birds trilled away in the soft whispering of the trees. The songs of birds accented the music of the swaying pines and the call of chipmunks racing in the forest.  Does it make any difference that this day of play was with sisters in their forties and sixties? 

I found you can never regain the childhood where this younger sister might have played with me but as young mature women we became those children as we played in the warm day. One comment by my other much older sister while we pawed through a box of jewelry was that we looked like a couple of eight year-olds. 

I have discovered that there are sisters who have followed you through eternity and lifetimes that have no claim to your blood but these women weep when you do, they pray for your loved ones, share the laughter, and the hopes of your world.  They are friends who are sisters in the heart.

          Interestingly enough, as years pass, sisters reclaim each other when trials of their life shutters into a time of disbelief, non harmony and pain. I find myself wishing for the times of playing without care.  But as I share and listen more closely to myself, I am joyful in finding sisters, friends and then sisters in the women that I meet.  I am being a friend and sister to myself by allowing this part of me to cry when necessary, hope when needed and to rejoice in the moment.  For after all, it is really all that we have.