Day 5 – 30 Day Challenge

Today’s post is all about the siblings. One of my favorite quotes is;

“You can pick your friends, but you are given your family and they are not returnable.”

It was 1973, I was 4 years old and life was fine. I was the first girl born to my dad’s family of 5 boys. My grandmother was thrilled. My mother’s four sister’s were excited to have another one to add to their tribe. I was very spoiled.

I was staying with my grandparents and aunts when mom and dad snuck off to the hospital to have my little sister. I remember my dad showing up with a little tin covered with Victorian ladies and filled with chocolate covered caramels. This was to cushion the news that they were bringing a squalling, screaming little bundle home.

She was tiny and had a dark thatch of hair. I remember thinking she looked like a fly. She laid in that little cradle and I thought,

“Well, it’s all screwed up now. Why did they go and do that?”

I couldn’t have been more wrong. She would, of course, become my partner in crime and only friend for miles, literally. We were “country girls” like Mary and Laura Ingalls. We were surrounded by farms and fields not neighbors and playgrounds. We spent a lot of time outside, using our imagination.

We fought and we laughed, who doesn’t? We hated each other and then got mad at anyone else that had the nerve to say anything bad about the other.

She is the funniest person I know. She can make me laugh like no one else. She is super smart and has the most amazing artistic gifts.

When she was 15 she was riding from town to our house with our mom and was in a horrible accident. The snowy, slushy roads pulled my mom’s little car into the path of a semi-truck. Their car was hit on my sisters side and she suffered a bad concussion, cracked ribs and internal bleeding.

She got better of course, but do you ever get better from something like that? I have spent hours and hours wondering what happened in that car? What was it like to be driving along, probably laughing or singing, with mom and then suddenly out of control with a huge truck bearing down on you?

Our mother was killed instantly. What did my sister see? Was she alone in that car, awake, with mom? She was only 15, so young, and to see that… I can’t imagine. I don’t want to imagine it.

My sister is still the funniest person I know. She can still make me laugh like no other. She is still super smart and has amazing artistic gifts. She is my best friend and without her I could never have lived through my moms death and the years that followed.

I love my little fly. I am so lucky that my parents brought her home…