My Sister in What Could Become an Ongoing Series

My sister and I have always had a relationship that was tentative at best. We competed for my parent's very limited time and attention as children, and tried to be as different from each other as we could manage. I was the intellectual, she had street smarts. I was reserved, she was a social butterfly. I was always a walking fashion disaster, she could (and still can) give Milan a run for its money. Even though we both went into the arts, I went for theater and she went into music. But perhaps that's where we realized that we had some similarities, besides growing up under our parents. No one else knows what it's like to grow up under the understated insanity that was our parents' system of childrearing.

If you read this blog with any regularity (and no one does), then you know that my sister and I got in a fight on my birthday this year and we had barely spoken three words to each other since then. Anyway, my sister was going to be in town for a wedding this past weekend, and I couldn't very well refuse her a place to stay. I spent a few hours cleaning up the worst of the dump I call my apartment and made up the daybed. She came in late at night on Saturday after seeing a movie after the wedding, and we had an abbreviated brunch before going to a movie. Afterwards, she went for a run and I went down for a nap. This all sounds very mundane, but at the end, after she admitted that she'd put her towel between the sheets because she found hair on them, she hugged me. My sister never hugs family members. Most of her adult life she's been trying to keep us from touching her. So despite the feeling that I was hugging a hatstand, it was gratifying. I guess I didn't do such a bad job of hostessing after all. Perhaps some things are mended between us after all. We'll always be very different, but perhaps we can be friendly, after all.