a special kind of double

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Toni Morrison

I happen to have four amazing siblings, three sisters and one brother (as opposed to all the other options for sibling types, like dolphin or Windex). But due to the fact that some of us are more than twenty years apart in age (as well as the timeless magic of divorce, remarriage, and step-parenting), all five siblings never lived together at the same time. Most of my childhood was spent with the girls I've previously designated as Wonderful Big Sister (WBS) and Wonderful Little Sister (WLS), and since I've given some air time to WLS in the last few months, I thought I'd even it up for WBS.

She was born about eighteen months before me, and as wee children we were pretty much inseparable.

I'm going to guess we're somewhere on the Israeli Mediterranean in this one. Date, circa 1984. I don't know, moms, do I look like I'm between 2 and 3? On the left there, that's me.

We were so alike and so different at the same time. She looked much more like our fair-skinned, blue-eyed mom, while I inherited our father's Cuban coloring. We both loved to read, but I lived in a world of books. Maybe she did too, but she grew out of it, and I never have. And she was always much more active than I was. I mean look at my fat little knees, I was just made for curling up under a blanket with Little Women and a block of cheese.

July 14, 1988, at the Orange County Fair.

Do you see those dimples on my sister? Those always mean mischief. See Picture B if you're not convinced.

She was always the ringleader (well, of a ring of two, is that properly a ring?) with a fabulous, inventive, borderline-devious imagination that always meant fun. She convinced me she had witnessed a robbery in our neighborhood that we had to investigate. Another time, it was a plane hijacking and subsequent crash that she made up and I bought, wholesale. We scoured our neighborhoods for clues and had the time of our lives. Sometimes I led the way, like when we decided to rename all the streets and glamorous locales in our prosaic, suburban neighborhood, just like Anne did when she first came to Green Gables. And I was the big mover-and-shaker behind our failed Little House bakery. When WLS came along four years after me, we may or may not have ganged up on her, a little, in that innocent, harmless, only moderately traumatic way siblings always seem to do. There was definitely a time when we convinced WLS that we'd been to Narnia through our parents' closet. There was possibly a time when we, um, told her she wasn't going to heaven. Which we got in a corking amount of trouble for.

We read the same books and watched the same movies over and over again--Sleeping Beauty, Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music, Clue, White Christmas--and we planned to stage our own productions of them when we were really old, like maybe thirteen and fourteen. Maybe it was because we traveled so much as children, or because so many things felt unsettled about our childhood, but it always felt like it was the two of us against the world. I wanted to be like her, even when I thought I didn't. She was indisputably my best friend, ever.

Relationships change. Kids grow up, and siblings often take their growing pains out on one other, fairly or otherwise. Now we have an ocean and several time zones between us, and it doesn't take a powerful imagination to feel like we inhabit two distinct worlds. But when it comes down to it, no one knows me like my sister, something that I think continually surprises us as we keep growing up, together. We don't get much time together in person, but when we do it is indescribably precious, even when it's ordinary. We fall into the same rhythms and cadences as we always did, although now hers has an enviable hint of Britishness and mine has a rather less appealing hint of booky dorkishness. Every time I talk to her, I realize it anew: we will always be new and different to one another, but we will always be the same, too, and that's a nice kind of magic.

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I'm sharing this post as part of Flashback Friday, hosted by the fabulous Jo at Mylestones. :) Want to play along but feel like you don't know any of the players? Well, I don't know any of these people either, not in real life. But they'll be friendly, I promise. They'll say nice things to you, and you'll say nice things to them, and before you know it, you won't know them like I don't! Which is to say, they'll become some of your favorite people ever, even though you've never been in the same room with them. So come join the fun!