Sixty years of sisters

My sisters and I have lived different lives in different places, but when we all got together in Vancouver this week to celebrate Betty's birthday, I was reminded of how much the past brings us together. From left, Betty (age 67); me (age 69), and Diane (age 68).

How we started out:  Diane, me, and Betty in the early 1950s, on the farm where we grew up in Alberta.

Getting ready to launch: Betty, me, and Diane in our teens. We all belonged to the local 4-H sewing club and learned to make our own clothes. All of these dresses would have been our handiwork.

We fought a lot, my sisters and me. In the early years, there was biting and kicking, and later, cold silences and competitive rivalry. But there was warmth and companionship, too, and an indelible understanding of what it meant to grow up on a small struggling prairie farm in the midst of nature. We played cowboys, we staged weddings, we rafted on the sloughs, and skated and tobogganed through the long winter months. We shared the daily misery of long rural school-bus rides, the excitement of lumpy Christmas stockings in the dark, and the ultimate annual pleasure of a week at our grandparents’ cottage on Sylvan Lake.

We were very different personalities, though, and with adulthood came different life choices about careers, families and geographic locations. Mostly, we didn’t stay in close touch, relying on our mother to keep up with all of us and pass along the high points to each other. Now that mom is gone and we’re well into the aging process ourselves, we’ve entered a new stage.

Betty, the youngest of us, turned 67 this week. Both she and Diane were in Vancouver from their homes in Quebec and the Kootenays respectively, so we decided to celebrate by getting together for the first time since mom’s funeral six years ago.

There was no biting and kicking over Betty’s birthday lunch. Instead, there was a rewarming of that long-ago sense of connection built by our childhood. We didn’t have to explain to each other why we all cook from scratch, why we would always choose a walk in nature over a walk in a shopping mall, or why plants, birds, dogs and other critters of the earth are always worth paying attention to. Our lives have been very different, but what shone through this week were the similarities that will connect us always because of our earliest experiences on that little Alberta farm.

I have always liked this picture of my little sisters and their (very cold) bride and ballerina dolls in the snow. Diane is on the left, Betty on the right.

Playing dress-up, decked with flowers from mom's garden, was part of our childhood on the farm. Betty is on the left, Diane on the right.

My little sisters at a Vancouver restaurant this week. Betty is on the left, Diane on the right. Their amusement is Betty's photos of the family dogs.