“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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