My Sister Myself

I’m in Florida with my sister Nan who snapped all the metatarsals in her foot when she whanged it in a fall. She was always thin and delicate. Even as a grownup she’d be subjected to idiot waiters pinching her arm at the table and saying “SOMEONE needs dessert!” (“Someone’s not getting a tip!”  Nan would counter with a big smile.)The mean boys in her Sixth Grade class used to hoot, “Sheehy! Go back to your toothpick factory! “ (Our maiden name was Sheehy.)Nan was the resident expert on grownups secrets when we were kids. She was on to that whole birds-and-the-bees thing by Third Grade and used a fake name to send away for pamphlets about it. She held these Sex Ed seminars for me and my stuffed animals. “OK here’s the deal,” she would say to us all: “Girls get this thing called their periods at 12 or 13. Boys get theirs later, more like at l9 or 20…”Well she was right about most of it anyway.She let me come down here as soon as I heard about this new fracture. She’s had the awful ‘super-virus’ known as MRSA three times already and in 2008 got a cut on her foot that caused her tto spend four months in the special costly five-times-a week, three-hours-at-a-whack hyperbaric chamber. It saved her foot if not her life. This break is on the same foot so we’re crossing our fingers that surgery can be avoided since hospitals are real breeding grounds for MRSA these days.I came to cook and keep her spirits up so we’re eating like mad and hitting the wine a little and talking about the fun we had when we were young. She composed a song about aging on her way to sleep last night and promises to write out the words for me. It’s to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” she says and if I know Nan it has a little swearing it but will be so funny you can’t help but laugh, like with that thing Mark Twain said when they asked him how he liked the opera. (Do you know it? Write in if so!)In the meantime that’s Nan on the left in this goin‘-on-an-overnight-hike picture, the year she was 12, with her best friend and cousin Mary Lou beside her. It’s how I see her still, young and wiry with the same look in those blue eyes always a little naughty, a little sad.I sure hope she gets better soon.