Unreplaceable you

My grandnieces and grandnephews, my sisters’ and brother’s grandchildren are brilliant flashes of energy and light. Each a mirror to a family member as well as their own unique oneness. When I was at my Mother’s early in May I met the two youngest of these beacons and marveled at how they fill into the greater whole of our family and the world. To witness my nieces transformed and complimented by their own brilliance with the new title of “parent” was fabulous, even though they’ve been at it a while now. The love they have scattered over their nieces, their brother’s daughters, and then too, cousins’ babies, their friends’ children has been combined and magnified back to their own progeny. There is that old give and take like a solid dance move as they look after one another’s children as their own and continue to support one another, their parents, grandparents and friends, not to mention spouses and partners and their growing (and shrinking) families. Because I did not know them as kids – I was abroad, I was afar, I was estranged or apart for many reasons, seasons and miles and ways – I am just beginning to really appreciate and know all that they do and all that my siblings have done to raise these amazing, hardworking, smart, talented (there is a slight possibility I am biased) and wonderfully individual people.

The outreach of care was much the same way we grew up, constantly with cousins, visiting aunts and uncles, plunking down to play at Gran’s (my paternal Grandmother). We cousins were close in age and we teamed and unteamed as friends. Then too, my sisters and brother teamed and unteamed in the smallness of our house. Once we reached high school, maybe before, we unhitched, I think. Our friends and interests too different. Our pull to be individual overtaking our young lives.

This same sort of care and love, this community, got my sister through a life-threatening myositis-type disease when her children were very young. Her friends rallied to support her and from afar it was frightening to hear what she was going through. She was able to get treatment, apparently three doses was all it took (my memory recall…) to “cure” her; save her life. I’m glad not one of her friends or medical team said, “You have to die of something.”

My sister is a caterer, one who is very good at what she does. She also is a mobile barber/hairstylist. She also is very involved in her community or should I say communities as she is a part of many. She’s a great mother and a fabulous grandmother. In my sister’s day to day work she wouldn’t not keep food refrigerated or hot as that could risk people’s lives, she wouldn’t not clean or sanitize. She wouldn’t serve rotten foods. Even when you have to “die of something”, that something is preventable. 

I love my sister, I don’t know if she knows how much, we’ve certainly not been close in years, and I do not want to lose her. Of the people in the US dying of COVID-19 right now the unvaccinated are heading the list. The real danger for me, as I see it, is those unvaccinated carrying the disease to those who cannot be vaccinated those below the age of 12, those who are immunodeficient, those who are against the vaccine for political or conspiracy reasons or who love someone who is against it. I don’t know. I do know there are a hundred things we do that we could die of if we don’t pay attention or don’t care. I do know I don’t want to lose my sister; Annie, I love you.

 

Siblings

We share a tongue of memory
though we each speak a different dialect.

At times we nod in understanding,
and then at other times, we look

to one another for definition. I do not
recall the time Becky ran away, how Diana

cried over a cat, or when Tom flew.
And they know little of my time.

The same house was filled with walls,
physical and those unseen.

When we gather we speak of inane things:
weather, cars, jobs. The price of love,

its shared threads, are never mentioned.
At Liza’s wedding, we gathered on the lawn

the band played an old 70’s song, some tune
we all knew, and for a moment, like bees

we danced, hummed in the sunlight,
understood every syllable uttered.