My sister just wrote and said she is hooked my blog, and I am jazzed! I was eight when she was born, and she was my littlest and best buddy for years. We had our own language--I will spare you the details, except to say that our word for yes was Seltz. Yup. Seltz. And in our world, we were not buddies, but bunnies. 

I had loved her since before she was born. Mom brought her home from the hospital on Mother's Day, and what jubilation! We had a baby, we even had little pieces of paper with her name and her inky footprints. I could NOT wait for show and tell at school.

Not that it always been easy--the whole sibling thing is a wild and varied dance for so many of us. I have been the overbearing older sister more times than I care to admit--thinking my protectiveness and unsolicited advice meant I was loving her well, when what she really needed was space to breathe. 

Could it stem from the time I was changing her diaper and accidentally poked her with the diaper pin? My heart thumping in my throat, I carried her to the kitchen with my face ashen, certain that she would be dying any minute.

Or the time when she was five and I was in charge of her when a gaggle of us neighborhood kids went to the fair, and I let her see carnival sideshow that frightened her so badly we had to go right home?

I can imagine, at 12, that I decided never more on my watch: my bunny would be safe by my sheer force of will! Maybe I could teach her everything she needed to know to be safe.

Here's the funny thing: all the times I tried to be her protector, her caregiver--and guess what? She is a professional caregiver, gifted in caring for and healing people. One couldn't ask for calmer, more competent hands than hers to nurse you back to health. 

When I was doing a show in San Francisco some years ago, one of the cast members became quite ill. My sister offered to take care of him during the worst of it, and to this day he refers to her as the angel who saved him in the darkest of times.

To do this for another person, now that is something worth learning. Funny how sometimes we end up learning the most from the people we try to teach.

Oh, how my best little bunny grew. Seltz!