Last month I’d put out a call for topics to write about this May. My older sister, as she has most years I’ve done this, suggested I take one day to write about why she is so cool. I suppose since I’ve written so much here about our younger sister, I can give her a nod toward equal time.
Between the two of us, she’s the adult. If we encounter problems in life, I’m the one who tends to retreat and think about what everything means from nine different directions before cautiously moving forward. She just does. Here are two stories to illustrate this.
First:
It’s no secret she’s on her second marriage. As is always the case, there wouldn’t be a second marriage if the first one had worked. When that first marriage comes to an end, there is always a final tipping point when decisions are made and bridges are crossed. The tipping point in that first marriage came to pass in the early days of one summer when her husband moved out and we all knew life was entering a new stage.
Some family event had been going on that weekend, and some of our cousins were staying with Jenny and the boys at her house. She wasn’t really in the mood to play hostess to anyone but honored the prior commitment. One time during that visit, everyone staying at the house was leaving for a quick shopping trip. One of the visiting cousins, a kid, locked the door from the garage into the house upon leaving. Maybe it’s what his family always did, maybe he thought it was what Jenny’s family did. Well, they didn’t, and it had been so long since anyone had locked that door they weren't sure where the key would have been except that they didn't have it. This was discovered before leaving and it led to a bit of chaos, because everyone was now locked out of the house. Nobody knew how to get back in, people were upset and growing agitated, blame was being tossed around.
In that same situation, I would have felt myself slowly beginning to melt and retreat, especially coming off of a run of difficult days like Jenny had just experienced. I would have tried to calm everyone done, logic my way through the available options and figured out what was the best thing to try. Instead, she walked across the garage, retrieved and plugged in a power saw and cut off the doorknob, then said something like, “Now we better stop and get a new doorknob, too.”
Second:
Jenny came too close to dying in a car wreck a few years ago. It’s only due to some miraculous confluence of events that she came back from that accident as well as she has. Two things happened in the first forty-eight hours of that crisis that spoke to who she is.
When the paramedics were carefully removing her from the remarkably destroyed car, she asked them that when they called her husband to let him know what had happened if they could remind him to turn off the Crock Pot before going to the hospital, because she knew he’d forget otherwise and dinner would be ruined. This might have been a real concern, or possibly a joke. (Joking like this wasn’t so different from what Erin had done after the surgery when her cancerous lung had been removed; while lying in her hospital bed in extreme pain, she confessed to our father she had knocked over his motorcycle once when she was twelve, figuring that was the one opportunity she had to tell him about it and and not get in trouble. This might help people understand more about where my sense of humor comes from.)
After settling into her hospital room and taking in her visitors during her second night, she was complaining about lying in bed so much after everyone, other than Dave and me, had left. I hadn’t been there all day and didn’t know what any doctors or nurses had said to her about activity, but since I had been feeding her soy milk one drop at a time the night before, it seemed like her recovery was going to be something unwise to rush.
Dave and I were both surprised, and taken aback, when she wanted her bed angled up enough so she could carefully stand and walk over to look at the white board showing the nursing schedule on the wall, saying something like “Might as well get started with this,” as she took her first few tentative steps. Meanwhile I’m thinking of how easy it’s going to be for her to tip over and shift one of the dozens of internal injuries that had left her millimeters away from paralysis. Dave’s expression looked exactly like what I was thinking. But she took her steps, turned around, walked back and got back in bed.
She went out to dinner on Christmas Eve a couple weeks later even though it left her exhausted, and was back to her job in four months. I wouldn’t have moved from the bed until I’d had second and third opinions telling me I was going to mess my body up any more than it already was. She just decided that day she was going to start walking again.
Between us, she’s the adult. She’s probably a little sick of that since there are still occasional times when I rely on her to talk me down or straighten me out, especially when she already has her boys, and her husband, and her dogs, and her whole world to manage. I’m just lucky she’s still here to do it when I need her to.
(One more thing: I didn’t mention that once I finally said I was probably getting a dog, she started to send me text images of dogs at the Coon Rapids Humane Society that met my criteria, usually with the message, “You should get this one.” This is how I can say with some certainty I’ll be getting a dog this year. If I sit on the fence too long, she’ll probably make the decision for me. And she’ll probably be right.)
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