Sunday, August 11, 2019

Who Is She?!


“Cu mainile mele am prins soarele
Si mi-am sadit caldura lui in inima.
Poate de aici am invatat sa iubesc.”
--
“With my hands I held on to the sun
And seeded its warmth in my heart.
Maybe this is how I learned to love.” (my sister)

She smiles. A lot. She talks. Even more. She is constantly moving, walking, cooking, turning on some radio that plays classical music, another appliance, another device … She remembers she has not taken her pills for the day, while she yells at the kids to get ready for their play-dates. She realizes her hair needs a touch-up and that she’s behind on answering her emails – all at the same time. She is a ball of energy, constantly rolling …

And she is so much more … It seems like the little insecure, shy girl that I grew up with has morphed into this self-assured adult who would not take crap from anyone, including her bigger sister – or especially her bigger sister. She is smart. So much smarter than me. She decides people’s lives for a living and can live with herself at night. How many of us can say that?!

She is an artist, a poet, a painter … She loves symphony concerts and European old movies. She loves Starbucks, and Zara, and H&M, bookstores and shoes. Art museums, botanical gardens, and hiking mountainous trails. Her favorite city in the whole wide world is New York City, but she feels at home anywhere big, and hectic, and dirty, and smelly, and reeking with history, but also anywhere wild, remote, with lack of the everyday commodities, like a mountain camp …

She tells me always that I taught her everything, and yet I would have never tried to learn Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, the principles of painting, Canadian history, Starbucks, Guinness (the beer), patience, the freedom of non-planning and of letting go, truly, if it were not for her … I would have never slept on a beach awaiting a sunrise, nor tried a latte if it were not for her.

She is my favorite conundrum: she will have no qualms about riding a bus all alone in NYC, but is terrified of driving. I love traveling with her because she makes me look for things I would never look for on my own. To think we share the same blood is still mind-boggling. We march by totally different beats.

She is a Canadian but so proud of her Romanian heritage that she oozes Romanian into everything she does – all the foods, the stereotyping of people, the way she talks about money, the friends she chooses … everything

She is a Leo and proud of it – in love with the sun, their ruling “planet”, and in love with gold and the thought of power. Of reign … She rules her kingdom, with grace and slyness, as she purrs coyly while walking away in a cloud of perfume. Like a true ruler, she is a lover of expensive things, and practical minded at the same time. Like a true lioness, she lives for her cubs. She dotes over them, and shapes them every day into these beautiful (inside and out) creatures. She plays with them, bikes, paints, reads and buys books with them, they plant herbs and clean up fallen leaves in the fall, she goes to concerts with them – I joke and say that she created her own buddies and a fan club at the same time. They adore her. Everything they do, they come to her first for approval. She is their Northern Star. Or maybe their ruling planet?!

She loves dark things, like stouts and full-body cabs, and dark chocolate, murder mysteries, and real-life kidnapping stories,  but her soul is nothing but light and hope; the sweetness of peaches in the summer and the gooeyness of the honey-like summer heat in the air. Her eyes filled with light are wide-open windows to dreams, and plans for the future. And mostly much hope. She dreams of a beautiful place she is trying to get to when every day closes, and she always assumes the goodness in all of us. A goodness foreign to even ourselves.

Reading the lyrics she wrote as a child reminded me of her basic connection with her ruling star, which has been telling every day of her life … She fills up every day since I can remember with this warmth and love and hope she’s learned from the sun, intrinsically, at birth.

She is my Yin to my Yang: she completes me and yet she is my true opposite in everything that is essential. She is my sister. My parents’ free gift to me. 

Happy birthday, sorella! I love you more now than when I started writing this, and less than tomorrow. Be bold. Be brave. Be happy. Be you! You are already everything else.


A year ago leaving Manhattan en route to Lady Liberty


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