Sisters Have to Love You Even When They Don't Like You

I heard about this really cool idea for teachers to use to deal with tattling in their class rooms. They set up a toy telephone, tell the kids to leave a message if they want to tattle and the teacher will get to it later. I don't have anybody to tattle to anymore, but since my sister is on her way here from Kansas and I do have a computer...

The only thing I learned in high school biology was about dominant and recessive traits: the chances of a recessive gene showing up when two parents have one of each is 25%.  I could see the example in my family. There were four of us kids and I got every recessive gene available. My siblings were tall, brown-eyed with dark hair. I was short, blue-eyed with red hair. (The plumpness gene didn't show up till after I had two kids and started eating their leftovers and baking cookies once a week.)  I was also the baby and took every advantage of it.

With my sister, Arleta, whose role of baby I usurped, it was not a case of opposites attracting.  She tried to boss me and I wouldn't mind her and the fight was on. Entirely her fault. OK, there was that time when we were young teens that she fell asleep in the car on a family vacation and I braided her hair in teeny braids all over and tied them with green string and she didn't know till she looked in the mirror at the restaurant later. But she was so vain that when the motel we were staying in caught fire in the night and I ran outside in my nightie and bare feet with my hair like a troll doll, she didn't come down till she had done her hair and put on full make-up. So she deserved it.

But then you somehow keep from killing each other and suddenly you get to be An Old Wife and you realize that sisters may have more to give each other than anybody else. When I had my mastectomy Arleta came from Kansas and stayed a week, sleeping (well, not really sleeping) at the hospital for the two nights I was there. I threw up on her more than once and she massaged my back where it was killing me so much that her knuckles bled from the blanket rubbing on them.  Later, when I was having painful treatments, she drove six hours round-trip to take me to the doctor and back.

And today she's making the six hour round-trip just for lunch, since we haven't seen each other since our mom's funeral. When we were driving back out to the cemetery that day she said, "I guess we're orphans now." So I can't really tattle on her anymore.

Someday there will be a time when there is no one else who can tell you why mom always cut the bacon in half before she cooked it or to walk around an antique shop with you and say "Grandma had that! If we had kept it we'd be rich." Or has the same memories you do. 

We do have a lot in common now: we are both Old Wives.