Sweet and Sour

The world is in a frightful mess I think. When I allow myself to think.

I'm avoiding my newsfeeds. I just don't want to know how Trump is going to get his way again, how he will evade justice, how he will have his slavering mobs adore him as he screams Fake News! It sours up my life and I'm too old for this shyte.

I retweet the odd item. I disengaged from Facebook until the fall. But I really don't miss it.

I meditate daily. Today's was refreshing in that it reminded me that the world is a chaotic place, always has been. We fancy ourselves as bringing order to everything but we just can't. Not even to our bodies where rogue cancer cells may lurk ready to careen around our internal hidden corridors or alternately block our veins and arteries and squeeze our heart until it fails.

So in a Barbara Bushy way I realize that I need to think pretty thoughts. So I started up my little knitting factory again (my stuff really sells well). To start I made a lovely little shawlette for my sister who has her first and long awaited grandgirl of her very own now. So I incorporated herself, her husband, her four adult children and her darling grandgirl into the shawlette. I get hot looking at it (it is scorching out her on The Rock and in Ireland) but in winter it will be welcome when all this heat is behind us.

I will share the other products later before I ship them off to the shop for sale. I believe y'all may enjoy them.

Wee Blisses

My sister and I talked on the phone for nearly 2 hours yesterday. I now get a cheap rate to Ireland of 5c a minute on my mobile. Ridiculous really. I love talking with my sister. My only sister who is nearly 14 years younger than me.

I'd given up hoping for one when all those boys started to arrive in our house. So had my mother. So had my father. When she was born somewhere around midnight on March 1st 195*, my taciturn father, a man who showed very little emotion and only cried once in my presence, burst into my bedroom in the small hours of the morning and could not contain himself: "It's a girl, it's a girl!" I didn't believe him. I had to see her.

And she was beautiful. I couldn't get over her. My mother (who was ill for a long time afterwards) and I mothered her. And dressed her in gorgeous clothes. I would knit her little jackets and Mum would make her dresses and we would clap our hands and exclaim to each other how simply lovely she was, how clever, how her blonde curly hair went to her waist in such a way Shirley Temple should be worried. I would take her in to high school with me and show her off. And yes, everyone was envious. They still remember it.

To this day, my sister never has had self-esteem problems and is a fabulous mother to 4 herself. When I think happy homes I think: my sister's place. She and her husband live in a very old house in Cork, one with rambling halls and back kitchens and an old conservatory and a big kitchen where everyone helps to cook and dance to silly music when they're doing it. She never stands on ceremony and I've seen her huge old table in the kitchen have two circles of chairs around it, the more agile eating on their laps and everyone talking at once. She has that way about her.

The sweetest thing among very many sweet things she says to me: "Your room is always here, WWW. Your room here has your name on the door. Always."

And one of the best things? Grandgirl and her friend are staying with my sister for a while this summer as they backpack Europe.

I get such a ridiculous charge out of calling my young sister "Great-Aunt."

My Sister

I love the way my only sister moves through her family.  In that special way she has. Confident, loving, funny. We are so different, she and I. But delight in the samenesses we uncover in each other. We are nearly fourteen years apart in age, she the youngest, I the eldest with four brothers in between us.  So we only discovered each other in adulthood. I had to wait a long time.

She has four adult children and a good solid marriage and one of those old houses that shoots out wings everywhere. I've said to her I could hide myself in here for a week and you wouldn't find me. 

She's more like our mother than I am. For instance, show her a piece of water, anywhere, and she will strip to her "togs" and dive in. Our mother would do that. I tell her this on our most favourite strand in the whole wide world when she emerges from a dive. She is delighted. She knew only a sickly mother. I knew one who sang in pubs and dived off piers and rocks at the drop of a hat and could embroider anything, anywhere.

We love to host and feed crowds in our houses. That we do well. We gloat in this commonality. We also sing a song together that we didn't know was each others' favourite until we performed it together in a pub one night. "Summertime".

She tells me she wasn't born with one bone of creativity in her body while I got it all. I tell her she has had a successful marriage and career along with raising four amazing children who love to come and hang about in the home she and her husband have created. A warm and welcoming place.

We all have our gifts. And sometimes we can overlook them. We need reminders of how absolutely bloody marvellous we are.

And darling sister, you are amazing.