I don’t post a Facebook status every day.  Some days I don’t really have a status.  Some days, I spend part of the day just trying to decide what my status would be if I really had to have one…which I don’t, of course.   I’m comfortable subsisting in a status-less state.  After all, I spent the better part of my life without a declared status.  Most of that went okay.

Today, and for the next twenty-nine days, I will declare my status on Facebook.  I’m calling it Thirty Days of Gratitude.  

I participated in thirty days of music.  It was fun.  It brought back a lot of memories.  Memories and music always mix with me. 

I got halfway through Project 365, an exercise in posting a photograph every day for a year.  My computer went on the fritz somewhere around photo number one-sixty. 

I was tempted to join a friend in posting a different, meaningful film everyday for a month…until I remembered I have no memory for titles, or actors names, and only retain tiny snippets of plot that prove to be ungoogleable. 

So why not do Thirty Days of Gratitude?  One thing’s for sure…I can use the reminder.

Today, I am grateful for sisters.  I have three of them.  All are younger, some more than others.

Laura and I are eighteen months apart which means sometimes I am two years older, and sometimes I am one year older, but I am always older.  Many parenting blogs suggest eighteen months to be an ideal age gap between babies one and two.  I’m thinking this estimation is made from the point of view of the parents whose workload, while doubled, isn’t complicated by diversity.  Basically, it’s like having another kid along for the ride.

Lower to the ground, though, the view is very different.  The competition began the moment she entered the house disguised as a puff of white organza and lasted until, as an adult with children of my own, I realized that with deference comes responsibility.  My mother shared things with Laura she never shared with me, but that doesn’t have to be because Laura was her favorite.  It might also be because Laura was interested, and a better listener and…well…there.

Today, Laura rarely wears organza, choosing instead easy-to-care-for knits, and scarves.  We both like scarves, but we wear them differently.  That’s what we are.  We are alike, but different.  I think that’s why we have so much fun when we are together.  Whatever the reason, the years have stripped away all the things that don’t matter, leaving us with our scarves, love for our kids, and the ability to make each other laugh…at most anything.

Holly came after Laura, and we both thought we’d never seen anything more beautiful.  Compared to us two tow-heads, Holly, with her chocolate brown eyes and curly locks to match, appeared downright exotic!  She had a sweet disposition and a smile to match.  I’m willing to bet both Laura and I carry the same image in our heads of Holly as a toddler, standing tall and proud next to the pencil-drawn line on the wall in my mother’s sewing room.  She couldn’t have been much over three feet tall.

Holly and I were always the closest of the four sisters.  We were the renegades.  We smoked and drank and made bad choices in men…and spent hours together on the telephone justifying our misguided decisions.  We’re not as close as we once were.  She doesn’t know how proud I am of her and the way she set a course for her life and stuck to it.  Years ago she told me she wanted to live on a mountain-top, faraway.  She does now, and she is surrounded by the things she loves best, animals.  I always knew that’s what she would do…what many of us never do.  She found happy.

Candi is the youngest.  She prefers to be called Candace, but after years of Candy, Candi is the best I can do.  Her middle name is Jane, so of course we called her Candy-Jane.  Mom even made a song out of it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I’m not so sure she liked it.  I always think we are ten years apart but when I count it’s actually seven.  It feels like ten though…

What with the age difference, we didn’t actually play together much as children.  I remember worrying about her a lot.  I expressed this to our parents and checked on her at night, when she was in her crib.

Even as a girl, I loved to concoct stories.  Once when I was about thirteen and Candi was three…no, make that six…I brought her to tears with one of my stories.  I remember the mix of feelings; the horror that I’d made my baby sister cry, and the thrill of doing something really well. 

Though not evident on the surface, Candi and I are probably the most alike in temperament.  We both march to music others don’t necessarily hear.  And, we are okay with that.  The tunes Candi hears are very different from those that play in my head, and we are okay with that, too. 

We live less than thirty minutes apart and only see each other about four times a year.  We addressed this issue a couple of years ago by instituting a monthly get-together we referred to as “Sisters”.  After about a year, conflicting schedules and, yes, priorities got in the way.   What with Holly living on her mountain-top, regrouping will be a challenge, but I hope we’ll find a way to do it…soon.  Whether eighteen months, ten years or seven years apart, we’re not getting any younger…