This is my sister and I at Sakonnet Point in Rhode Island last October. I am 61 and she is 73/4 - somewhere around there. We don’t much talk about age in our family, except to visualize the future “when we are old” and can sit companionably on the porch smoking our corn cob pipes together. Well, possibly no corn cob pipes, although they’ve always been a part of the amusing picture that we paint when we think about our lives winding down and ending…somewhere in the dim mists of the distant future. We come from hearty yankee stock - women who raised families under challenging conditions and survived to remember and tell about it. When my sis visited me this past October, we went apple picking with my DH & granddaughter - and climbed to the top of many an apple tree in pursuit of the highest and best fruit. We came home with far too many apples, but sat gleefully around the kitchen table peeling them all into a great tub of lemon-flavored water, and then turning them into pie and apple sauce and dumplings and tarts enough for an army. We laughed, and my daughters came, and their dh’s and my little grandson, and we all laughed and carried on and took pictures of ourselves misbehaving.

The next day, my sis and I drove off with a few day’s clothes thrown into duffles and headed for Rhode Island, the rocks, the water, and the people (if any were still alive) that we knew as children. In the picture above, we are laughing (we are always laughing, it seems) out on the jetty at Sakonnet Point - where my father kept his little fishing boat that my sis and I grew up accompanying him on. He wasn’t a fisherman, he was an engineer, but he grew up on the ocean, and having done that ourselves, we understand the need to stay connected. So we - the two old ladies - became children again and skipped along the jetty and remembered.

We ate fried clams, too, with plenty of tartar sauce. Clearly not on my diet, and rarely on hers - not because she needs to lose any weight (She’s always been the runt of the litter) but because she and her husband have retired to the mountains of North Carolina, which are beautiful in their own way, but do not satisfy the yearnings of someone raised by the sea, and don’t offer much in the way of fresh seafood.

My sis just about raised me all on her own. By the time I was born, my mother, a registered nurse, had gone back to work full time at the hospital, loved her job, and wasn’t about to give it up (again) to raise another generation of children. My brother and sister had made it to their teens, and she (my mother) had begun experiencing a little freedom, finally. So she took the 3-11 shift at the hospital, and my dad and sister…and sometimes my brother…took care of me. My sister’s name is Connie, but I apparently had trouble pronouncing “c’s” or some such, because I always called her (and do to this day) “Nonnie”. It’s a source of grand amusement to her that I have grown so much taller than she is; she is fond of telling how she carried me around on her hip until my feet started dragging on the ground.

And we played “Thelma & Louise” with what I must say was grand panache…drove into the sunset at least once with silken scarves floating behind us and our oversized sunglasses perched jauntily on our heads. It was a wonderfully free time - no spouses, no children - just the two of us laughing and walking and climbing things we probably hadn’t ought to have climbed, and breathing in that unmistakably New England salty sea air.

We want to do Malibu and the Pacific Coast Highway together for our next act.

Except the results of her heart catheterization yesterday demonstrated that a valve needs replacing - requiring, of course, somewhat risky open heart surgery.

Again, we spoke optimistically together, but at the end, she quietly told me that she wanted cremation - and wanted her ashes thrown out off Sakonnet Point, which is where mine will go, too.

I am feeling sad, but hopeful, too, that we will have more “Thelma & Louise” times together.

My sister is an extraordinary woman. And yet, as I mentally work my way down the list of blog-mates, it occurs to me that we are, all of us, extraordinary, we women with our lives that are alike in so many ways and yet so different in others. It is encouraging to me to read the thoughts of you who are in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties…and to find such similar concerns and questions, such caring and concern for each other. Because the beat truly does go on, doesn’t it? We pass the torch from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, sister to sister, from friend to friend, and somehow, we manage to rise above the mundane details of life and focus on what really matters. I feel quite honored to be a part of such company, just as I feel quite honored to be, for however long, a part of  my sister’s life. More and more lately, I am reminded of the interconnections and relationship with women everywhere.

I am hoping, selfishly, for a positive outcome with my sister’s surgery; a reprieve, if you will…a little more time with her.

I am glad to have this place to come where I can say that, because I don’t share much of this sort of thing with co-workers or acquaintances. With my daughters and with my DH, yes. But not nearly so wordily as I feel free to do here.

So, thank you.