Sibling dibling

[kate_schaefer]

My sister Gini is visiting me right now. At this minute, she's sleeping in my guest room, since she got up at oh-dark-hundred two time zones away and traveled via delayed airplane to our land of unexpected ice and snow. That is, we expected this particular ice and snow, but in general, we don't expect ice and snow in Seattle, so we're never really prepared to deal with them.

The special joy of having my sister visit, aside from just enjoying hanging out with her, is memory. She says, do you remember our neighbors in Brunswick? And I say, the Kowalskis, on the right. There were a bunch of boys, and Linda. We went to Linda's wedding, years later. No, the other side, she says, and she names them, the family on the left, and the family past them, and the family past them, and the children in each of those houses: Nina, Polly, Christina, big girls, all of them, Gini's age or older. Past that last family, there was a swamp, a real swamp, and we weren't allowed to go there, but we did any way. In the other direction -- two or three families past the Kowalskis -- was Gini's piano teacher, Mrs. Gardner (all grownups were named Mrs. and Mr. in the fifties). We could get to the Gardners' house by going through backyards, which was important, because we weren't allowed to walk on the street by ourselves and there wasn't a sidewalk. We especially weren't allowed to cross the street without grownups, so it was good that there was so much to explore in our block. Not being allowed to cross the street wasn't a hardship; in my memory, there were no houses across the street then. I'll have to ask Gini if there were houses across the street in her memory.

Tomorrow, I have to pass my sister on to her son and his family, who live north of here. She has grandsons to visit and admire, and fine grandsons they are, too. Tonight, we touched back to our youth; we went to a country her son cannot imagine and certainly cannot visit. I don't want to live in that country, but it's good to be able to visit it from time to time.

Comments

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

I understand the memory thing, but for me it's in reverse: I'm my brother's memory, as I'm the older sibling. Still, there are things he remembers that I don't, and he comes with a bonus of having close friends who were close not only to him but my mom, so we all make a point of getting together whenever I'm back east, and we have conversations like the one you relate here. There's a singular pleasure in that sort of shared memory. I understand.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

We remember things for each other and remind each other of different things. I'm younger than Gini, so she can remember some things more clearly than I because she understood the context at the time better than I did, but I have a better memory overall, where "better memory" is defined as "brain stuffed with a larger number of memory cues". She was eight and I was five when we moved away from that house, so all those memories are more than fifty years old now.

I'm pretty sure the Kowalskis were not actually named "Kowalski", but some other Polish name beginning with K. I've remembered their last name as Kowalski for years now, but for some smaller number of years, I've also remembered that I have that wrong. The correcting memory always shows up some random interval after the original memory.