If anyone needs a reprieve from the grief and struggles of everyday life, I suggest you head to the mountains. Pack up your favorite things and leave your phone on airplane mode. The magic of the Rockies, whether an Alberta blue-sky day or a spring snow fall, every moment looks like a Hallmark greeting card. It is magical. I am filled with gratitude that I can enjoy this gift from God so often. This last trip was no exception.
I went with my sister. We spent our days shopping, eating at our favorite spots and talking way past bedtime. She shared with me an e-mail she came across that I had sent her in 2021. I had taken a course about ‘finding your authentic self’. One assignment was to write about family relationships. I had written:
We have a close, immediate family. Although I have a half brother, my sister is my go-to for everything. I am lucky to have her and not sure how I would get through life without her.
Darlene was the younger, prettier, more outgoing sister when we were growing up. I was saddled with housework, chores, school, and my mother’s idea that I was helping her raise Darlene. While I worried, fussed and planned, my sister lived life. She was daring, outgoing and popular. She was confident… She was skinny although we called her the human garburator because of the size of her appetite. She was smart in school and the boys flocked around her. She was asked to be a model in a local talent agency and worked in retail clothing as her school job. She was the package. And I admired her full life.
She was the one who wanted to get married, have a family and live out her days in urban splendor. My father always said he saw me on a farm, packing water to the house and tending to others while my sister would jet-set to New York and other fancy cities because of her work. And yet when my sister was offered a modeling gig in the States, my parents would not let her go. At the end of the day, my sister fell in love with a salesman she met through work and did settle down into a bungalow with two kids and a dog…
My sister’s recollection of her own past was so different from mine. She never saw herself in that light. It was therapeutic rehashing our childhood, the antics and expectations of our parents, our community and ourselves, to be reminded of how and why we were quite different and yet remained so close.
Siblings are a complex relationship; raised under the same roof, there would be similarities, yet the individual differences, the separate dreams and hopes and life experiences shape each of us into something unique. Siblings can share a comfort that is unexplainable. A bond like no other. We become a being of all the events shared during childhood, the good, the bad and the ugly.
When sis left to drive back to her own home, I went for a walk along the mountain path. I thought about our adventures, and I began to cry. Not sad tears, but rather thankful tears that through our soul plan, we chose each other to be siblings. I cried about the challenges we faced together and the laughter we share. And I cried in hope that I will have many, many more years with her. I truly can’t imagine life without her.
…I hold her hand. And she holds mine. And together we walk this life with all it’s hopes and sorrows.
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