Sister Sue

Happy Birthday Sister Sue!

This is not my painting (wish it was) but I picked it because it is a bear, the color of brown-eyed Susans, and looks like mountains in the fall all at once.

It is this time of year- summer vacation- when I would pack my bags of Barbie dolls, plastic horses and Nancy Drew books and head down to your house in Pittsburgh. We would eat peanut-butter sandwiches cut into quarters with the boys, go to the park, the other mommys would come over and I'd play with all the little kids, secretly wishing for the Fisher-Price barn. I dreamed of someday being you- the beautiful house, out Marthaing Martha Stewart before she even *thought* about things like making her own rock garden... all the friends and kids, the garden, Jenny-dog who I loved and Carla black with her tiny kittens up by the furnace.

When I was older I helped paint closets, babysat and you tried to teach me to be fashionable (I do think I'm a lost cause... but still and all~) You were always so together in my eyes- creative and smart, beautiful and full of the secret knowledge about 'grown-up woman stuff' (sex and diets, fashion and babies, dinner parties and boy scouts...)

Right now all of my photographs are buried somewhere in house-renovation mess, but I remember you as: dressed up going down to work at IBM (so glamorous!), in your long wedding dress that was slippery (satin?) and the blue flowers, shorts and a t-shirt, paint splattered and happy as you worked on the house, dressed up to go out- you smelled so good- I don't remember the outfit (maybe the dark dress with white dots?) but I can smell the perfume and see you smiling (and I was wishing that someday I would be so beautiful and grown-up, out for a date). I think of you singing 'gray squirrel, gray squirrel, swish your bushy tail. Wrinkle up your funny nose, hold a nut between your toes, gray squirrel, gray squirrel, swish your bushy tail'.

We are so lucky in so many ways that we don't realise. I am lucky to have you as a big sister- someone who I look up to, could count on and try to model myself after~ you do so much for all of us, thank-you for that- but we love you because you are you, Sista Sue! Happy Birthday!