Time and Tides

My Sister, Joan, was born in 1942. She was the first of the three of us. Not just the oldest, but the caretaker, the watcher, the rememberer. She fended off bullies, sunburns, and horseflies. She taught me everything necessary to grow into a woman capable of living through my own mistakes, some of which were colossal. And I wasn’t easy to train.

I can’t tell you much about what she was like as a kid. By the time I came along, she was eleven, and my brother was seven. I can tell you that my earliest clear memory of her is of a gorgeous black and white confection of a prom dress. The skirt reminded me of fairy wings, delicate, transparent, and draped over a foot-deep pile of crinolines. I remember sitting cross-legged on her bed and telling her she looked like a princess.

Like any sisters, we had our contentious moments, but they weren’t any more severe than our dispute over a hotly contested purple hairbrush. She refused to let my red hair sully its bristles, and I thought I had the right to not only use it but to swipe it and hide it. Thirty years later, we found the brush again tucked into the back of one of the drawers in our mother’s bureau. Joan brandished it at me like a long-sought treasure, and I had to admit to my wrongs. It was a funny, tearful coming together at a time we needed nothing more than to know we were connected by more than blood.

Over the years, our lives took very different paths. Hers more traditional than mine, but the common thread was that she never let time pass without gathering my daughter and me into the fold of her loving care. She was always there, ready to accept us and help if she could, ready to teach, ready to lead by example. And that spirit will always be with us.

If there is a measure to determine the value of a person’s life, it is found in what they leave behind. Joan left a legacy of love—for her husband Dale, her four children, her brother, her sister, her nieces, nephews and a vast raft of cousins. It was her claim to fame and her proudest accomplishment.

We were all lucky to have her in our lives.

For now that’s “What’s On My Mind”

Jayne