I just got back from a week visiting you.  You had surgery on your hip - a very complicated, very long surgery that left a magnificent 9 inch scar girdling your hip, running parallel to the old scar, forming a railroad track on your fair white skin.  

I called just now to let you know I made it back ok, and to make sure that you didn't somehow start backsliding the moment I took my eye off you - I have always, somehow, had that fear. Growing up, "take care of your sister" was a prhase that followed me, constant as the moon.  You were the delicate one, a certainty that defaulted me into the assumption of capability.

Your voice on the phone is cheerful.   Then you say Well, and I say, OK, and we make our goodbyes -  we are not the type to say I love you at the end of phone calls, a fact that surprises people who get the chance to  witness this. 

But you are so close, they say in protest, as if the failure to hug were a personal reproach to their idea of love. 

We are more than close, I sometimes want to say, but never do.  We are more than close, we are sisters, we have lain in the trenches of family warfare and stared silently at one another as the bullets whistled above us. We have been splattered with one another’s innocent blood.  I’ve received more comfort from the whites of my sister’s eyes than most lovers’ arms.  There is no shame in this for my lovers: my sister’s eyes are lovely – large and hazel, the brows arching over like seagull's wings. 

On the phone, I have difficulty remembering you as the woman you are.  Your voice travels to me, dropping years until I see you clearly in my mind’s eye, always eight, bony-kneed, your smile the biggest thing about you besides of course your scar.  Your hand-me down clothes that were always  too bright, too striped, unzipped or buttoned wrong. Your ghostly white complexion  that deflected sun, something we found as many insults for as the Eskimos have words for snow, a joke that over the years has neatly turned to your wrinkle-free advantage. 

Thin-wristed, you patiently tagged after me, waiting me out until the time I’d stop outgrowing you.   Your awed regard for the random two years between us; the way you made yourself the watchdog of my adolescent beauty.

You did not find the love I wanted for you, the kind that would light your eyes like lighthouse lamps, marking the way home.  You did not move to a city to wear black, turning your pale skin into a fashion statement, a power move.  You never learned to wear high heels.  You married, disastrously, then again, less so.  You collected dogs, none of them beautiful except in the way they were loved. 

Like milkweed pods, my  wishes for you dry up and float away, tiny rugged boats on the creek stream behind our old house.  They flow easily past the sleepy buzzing field where we searched for four leaf clovers, the dust bowl of the baseball field, the basketball hoop, the clubhouse tucked deep in the pine trees.  They float, buoyed on the cool crystal reality that the bombs of our childhood did not find their target, a failure I once attributed to my high-heeled, black wearing city strength, my vigilance, but now realize has far more to do with that small pale eight year old in the too-large shorts, trotting after me sure-footed as a goat.