She's My Sister

 

I don't call as often as I should as the elder

between us but she laughs, tells me she was

expecting my call, it never fails when she suddenly

visualizes me though we haven't seen one another

in years. Not too good she responds when I ask

how she is, but then she hasn't been too good

progressively for years and the trend continues

but she has a tendency toward self-deprecation

and when we speak laughter comes easily to her.

Mostly we reminisce once we've exhausted the

pleasantries -- or not too pleasant news of our

respective children's lives and I suspect that part

of her 'not too good' revolves around her children's

lives. We speak of the conundrums of existence

of the difficulties facing the world communities

of dire consequences of living in old-age homes

in the 'golden' years where the global pandemic

has strewn its peculiar type of violence. We talk

of the haphazardness of life's  trajectory, that our

father, an orphan sent from the streets of Warsaw

to Canada as an indentured farmhand and our

mother's home in the Pale of Settlement bombed

by White Russians, her emigration with her sister

to Canada and the long years it took for both he

and she to pay back their passage before they 

were free of debt, free to resume young lives, free 

from the horrors of the Holocaust, and we sigh.