My Sis

Ain't no one like my sister. Last winter when I was feeling really sad, she got on a train that very afternoon and came to stay with us for five days. She cheered me up so much that I felt like a different person by the time she left. Know what we did that was so therapeutic? Nothing, really.

We went to TJ Maxx and looked through the junk on the racks, we helped Maddie's troop sell Girl Scout cookies in the freezing cold in front of the Jewel, we lay around and talked about things that only the two of us find funny, hilarious, in fact. And that's what helped.

Pam and I, four years apart, grew up in the same world, but different hemispheres. I finished one school before she started it, we had no friends in common, and we fought constantly. It drove me crazy that she followed me around the house like a puppy dog, always bugging me, encroaching on my space. Our mother said that Pam looked up to me, that she just wanted to be around me because she loved me. Hmph! Not a good enough reason for me to sacrifice my time for the likes of her.

She broke my toys. She ripped my books. She peed on the kitchen table. She had a wild, cackly laugh that rang throughout the house.

But though on the surface we seemed on different sides of the equator, I have come to realize, gratefully, that no one else in this entire world understands me like my sister. Not another person in the universe has experienced things with me the way she did. We made up the silliest games. We lay in our twin beds in our shared bedroom and pretended we were on a houseboat. She is the only person ever, to have shared with me the bedtime stories our dad told us every night. We come from the same stock: we both love, oh crave!, Brussels sprouts, we both laugh heartily at the time I ran home from the city swimming pool in terror because of a thunderstorm, and we both remember the time I ran away from home for a total of 30 minutes before having regrets and coming home to find that she and my mother had already gone to the police station to file a report in response to my runaway note.


My sis and I talk on the phone just about every single day. I can say absolutely anything to her and she will never take it the wrong way because she understands just what I mean. She is the person who finds me funniest. If I could take some of her back pain so that we'd each have only half instead of her having to bear it all, I'd do it in a second.

I love you, Pammy.