Sisters Close Gap In Hearts
My sister Sherry called me one day last summer. After 10 years of silence between us, she was coming to visit.
We weren’t buddies growing up. I was five years younger, pampered as much as she was prodded. In the competition for attention in our home, I was the handsdown winner. By the time we were adults, a supertanker could have fit in the gulf dividing us.
I let her drift further from me in my 20s. I moved 1,000 miles away, started a family, career. She started her family within range of the examining eyes of our parents. They saw everything she did wrong while they read in my letters only what I did right.
When I visited Sherry in the mid-‘80s, my children didn’t like her. She was tense, distant, dictator of her home. We didn’t talk again until last summer.
In that 10 years, she divorced her husband, daughter and parents. Knowing every mistake Sherry had made since birth, my parents sided with her husband.
I listened to my parents. They had always been my guiding light. Sherry didn’t ask me for support, and I didn’t offer any. My mistake nearly cost me my only sister.
She called me on a whim last June. I cried when she told me over the telephone who she was. With her new husband she came to my home, happy, relaxed, a stranger whom my family and I embraced. We walked along Lake Coeur d’Alene, burying years of misunderstandings, laughing, hugging. Like sisters.
My two teenage daughters seem happy. They fight, but they make up, just as Sherry and I did. I can’t help but wonder: Am I planting seeds now that will hurt them in the future?
Wine for dollars
The people who planned Hospice’s wine-tasting fund-raiser at the Hayden Lake Country Club on Saturday used a few extra brain cells to come up with extraordinary auction items.
Try this on for size: a cruise for 150 people on Fred Finney’s new boat or an adventure package that includes a HarleyDavidson ride around Lake Coeur d’Alene, an airplane tour of the lake, a parasailing trip and a leather jacket to look the part. Tickets go fast. After all, the affair includes 75 wines Call 772-7994.
Hanky time
Few plays clean out the tear ducts like “Steel Magnolias.” Wallace’s Sixth Street Melodrama opens with the Robert Harling production Feb. 9.
From what theater manager Pat Grounds says, audiences can only hope performances reach the high caliber of the rehearsals. Take an extra hanky and do everyone a favor - leave the little ones home for the evening. Call 752-3081.
Friends forever
My friend Beth and I agreed in 1966 that boys were stupid and ice cream was essential to life. But it was our hair that bound us together for a lifetime.
Every morning we’d walk to school pulling at the ends of our shoulder-length hair hoping to keep it from curling in the oceanside fog. It never worked, but we were miserable (and unfashionably curly) together throughout our school years.
Adulthood separated us. But the hair that tied us together in the first place never unknotted. We write every Christmas, send pictures of the kids. They don’t have curly hair.
What agonies did your best friend help you bear? Write your story in less than 300 words and send photos. If your story is published, you’ll receive a “Close to Home” surprise. Send your work to Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200. Coeur d’Alene 83814; or FAX to 765-7149.