This past weekend four of my sisters and I went to Stratford to see a play, "The Matchmaker" as a birthday celebration for the oldest in the group, chronologically, but definitely the youngest in spirit. We started this more than five years ago and have only, when life allowed, repeated this for each of our birthdays, three times so far. We want to keep it going.
The sister whose birthday we were celebrating has cancer. She had a double mastectomy 5 years ago and is currently undergoing another round of chemotherapy. I got the news about her current condition while working on a painting in my second year of a fine art program. This shifted my focus for the painting. A certain percentage of the painting had to have personal content in it and I was going to reference an old photo of myself from when I was about 4 years old, but instead decided to use a photo of my sister, seeing as how she was on my mind constantly anyway. Once finished, I offered it to her while making sure that she knew that she was in no way obligated to take it if she didn't like it, and as it is a large canvas, measuring 4'x6' so finding a place for it is tricky. Happily she did really seem to genuinely like it from the photos I sent her of it and wants it. What followed was a short series of emails sharing and elaborating on our connection to each other.
I think I was about 7 or 8 years old when I met her for the first time as she was living with some of the relatives of her Father, my step-Father who had married my Mother. She is the only one of his daughters that came to live with us. He had 3 more daughters, and a son living in a different province with family and only his two oldest sons living with him. Their Mother had cancer and died when the youngest was only a baby of around a year old, and so for whatever reasons, five of his children, all but the two oldest boys, went to stay with his family.
My sister was a bit of a wild child apparently once she hit puberty, so she came to live with us. All I remember back then was her laughter, her singing and her constant horsing around with her older brothers. Other than that I just remember being a bit awestruck, as she laughed more often than anyone I knew and didn't treat me like the crybaby that I was. I am pretty sure she was the one that started singing with and to us girls at night in bed. Those bedtimes are some of my fondest early memories.
When she got a bit older she worked at a lunch counter in, Woolco or Kmart and would sometimes take me with her to work. I would wander around the store after being treated to an ice cream sundae that she would make for me. I'm not sure how many times I tagged along with her but I truly felt like the luckiest little sister to have her want me along. There were also times when she would return home early from a date and take me to her favourite Chinese food restaurant, if our parents were out for the evening and I was on my own. It was from her that I developed a taste for Chinese food and anything beyond the usual meat and potatoes we usually had at home.
When us four sisters did the play and dinner the first time for my birthday more than five years ago, she gave me this wall plaque that reads, "Chance made us sisters, Hearts made us friends". She said in a recent email, that she doesn't think about us having different parents, we are sisters. I can only add that I couldn't love her more if we had the same parents.
The four of us together are a wonderful mix of personalities. The oldest sister I think of as the spirit for her laughter and spark of positivity, another the heart, because she is inevitably always the one who thinks of personal touches, from making bracelets to knitting scarves for us, the youngest as the bridge as she has the same Mother as two and the same Father as the oldest of our foursome and she brings us together in other ways too. I am not sure what I am, I take direction from the others, making bracelets and scarves for instance and go along with whatever they suggest for our birthday celebrations but am still the one who will suddenly dissolve into tears at the thought of not being able to join them for future celebrations because of financial restrictions.
I looked up soul and found these definitions fit for me;
soul
a : the moral and emotional nature of human beings
b : the quality that arouses emotion and sentiment.
I certainly arouse some emotion and sentiment in our sister group. I don't know if they would agree but I know from now on when I think of us together, we will be the Spirit, the Heart, the Bridge and the Soul, that embodies our sisterhood.
