Remembrance

The picture above is of my family when I was between 2 and 3 I think. Clockwise from top left: My sister Barbara, my mom, my dad, my sister Patty, my brother Bill and in the middle? me of course.
I've tried restoring it some. There's a long way to go on that effort.

My sister would have been 69 years old this January had she lived. We were always quite close. Oh, Patty wasn’t good about writing and stuff like that, but she was fun, devoted and so inspiring.
She was in High School before I went to kindergarten. She was a superb artist with a strange sense of value and self respect. When I was small, she would never finish a drawing for me without ruining some part of it. I’d scream and kick and cry and she’d say “Well you’ll just have to learn to draw your own pictures.”
Patty was never cruel or bossy as can be with some oldest children, but she was usually in some kind of fix. She laughed at life and when young, may have avoided some of her responsibility, but no one could help loving her. She was witty, beautiful and light hearted. She went away when I was 7 and came back two years later with a husband, a little girl and a son on the way. They lived in our home for a time.
Life was not kind to my sister. She had 8 children she adored and a nervous breakdown half way through the number. Her 4 children stayed with us while she was in the hospital. Her oldest daughter was only 8 years my junior and seemed more like a sibling at times. I left the baby in the mid day sun and burned her pretty bad. I wasn’t much of a caregiver, being the youngest and only spoiled child of our four. But I loved their mom.
There was seldom any financial or material bounty in their home, but she made it work, somehow. She had a daydreamer’s matter of fact approach to life if that’s possible. She did what had to be done. I would have babysat for her for free, but she always found a little bit to pay me and always recommended me to others who would pay me quite well.
Once, in 1982 I went to visit her. She was short on transportation, so she walked to work. She drove a bus and she took me home after I had walked to work with her. That afternoon, we walked the familiar roads of my childhood to go to the store for a few needed items and a few simple pleasures. I was an active person who regularly exercised, swam 2 miles a day, and road horseback twice a week. The next day, I could barely make it up from the room I stayed in downstairs. She laughed a little and took off on foot by herself for her job.
On one visit, she was working on her car. I, who am mechanically inept, surveyed the neatly arranged parts. Every screw, every black thing, every part was lined up along the side. She explained that she really didn’t know enough about mechanics to recognize one thing from another, so by lining them up, she was able to get it all back together right. It was a true sign of her resourcefulness.
The last time we spent together was in the summer of ’92. I had planned and put together a family reunion at a state park an hour from our home and though she lived over 800 miles away, she was determined that she and all her children would attend that reunion. All but one did. Only she knew at that time that it would be the last reunion she would attend. It would be our last “fun” time together. We walked, talked, shared, laughed, cooked. We spent every waking moment of three days relishing each other’s company and then she headed home.
A short time later I received the call from her that admitted she had cancer. It had gone too far. She hadn’t wanted to fight, but now she did and she was afraid it was too late. It was.
I saw her once more: a short visit at the end of a mountain trip. She wanted me to come, though it tired her greatly. She was so thin and weak, but a couple of times I saw a short sparkle in her eye as we visited. There were suddenly things she knew she would miss, tasks that seemed unfinished. She was not happy about dying, but knew it was coming. It was as though in this hour, she was comforting others, still doing what had to be done. I still miss her. Happy Birthday, Patty