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I’m spending the weekend at my sister’s new house in Woodstock, NY.
I wanted to take a weekend alone to re-connect with her.
We just got out of a beautiful yoga class with “Glenda the good witch,” as my sister calls her. Class topic: gratitude.
I’m feeling sentimental and happy.
In downward dog, I pictured us....
I remembered in 1989, my sister somehow convincing our parents to let me, 16, move to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer with her, 21 - legal drinking age, yes!
We jumped in her white Rabbit with Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead tapes, and bikinis, without jobs or a place to live.
We had some of the best times of our lives - couch surfing (once we slept in a cardboard box), skinny dipping, partying, kissing boys, house painting, waitressing - whatever we could do to make a buck to buy sandwiches for the beach. (We told one old rich perv that no, we wouldn’t paint topless and never went back.)
She took me to my first Dead Show.
She taught me how to drive a stick.
She urged me to WAIT to have sex until I truly fell in love and trusted.
I remember anxiously asking her about sex, imagining post-coital awkwardness:
“What do you say the next day when you wake up with each other?”
“When you love the person, you don’t have to worry about it,” she assured me.
Together, we worried at times we’d never find the right guys for us. Were we too picky? Too difficult to deal with?
A friend’s mom once told us, maybe pitied us, saying, “You girls are just so special, it’s going to take very special men to make you happy.”
Both of us in our forties met the love of our lives.
Her man is my age, mine is her age, both strapping powerful giant love bugs who can handle Bulmans.
The yoga teacher Glenda said to me with a big smile today, after Kristin walked out - “She’s so lovely, your sister.”
”She is, isn’t she,” I agreed, right before we took this picture. (HOW do we end up wearing such similar clothes?!)
Glenda brought to mind my love for her - Kristin’s totally unique super friendly energy and hilarity, that finds the fun in any situation.
The part that rescued me from my own taking myself too seriously doldrums so many times.
She showed me bridges to new places and ways of being, to euphoria.
The name of where we shared yoga today.