Sisters

My parents had 6 children altogether. My oldest brother, Bobby, passed away when he was 6 hours old due to a hole in his heart. My sister Lyn came next, then me, then my sister Cindy, followed by my two brothers, Les and Paul.

Lyn is a year and half older than me. She suffered from asthma really bad as a child (still does today) and spent so much time in the hospital. She was held back a year in school because of this illness. By the time we reached high school, everyone thought we were twins. In the picture above we are almost the same height! This picture was taken in May of 1969, I was 8 years old. I had to write a report and did mine on the tuna boat industry that was in San Diego at that time. My dad took the family down to the docks and the city of San Diego, and took all the pictures for my report. This was in the day prior to computers and typing reports to print them out nice and neat. My handwritten (in cursive at that!) report is in a box out in the garage somewhere right now, but I found this picture in my suitcase full of family photos that I am slowly organizing into family albums.

Lyn always looked out for me as a kid. Once, this very same year of the above picture in fact, we were visitng with a classmate at her house playing in her pool. I did not know how to swim so I was making sure I stayed on the shallow end. I got a little brave and instead of jumping in the pool where I safely knew it was the shallow end, I got a little too close to the middle and jumped into the deep end. I very vividly remember panicking and almost drowning. Lyn held onto the edge of that pool and inched her way over to where I was fighting for my life and reached out and grabbed me and drug me out of the pool. I literally owe her my life.

It was mine and Lyn's job to do the dishes as we were growing up. She washed, I dried. Oh, all the conversations we would have! And we used to sing while we did the dishes, too. One time we were cutting up instead of doing the dishes and I threw the sugar bowl at her and missed just as our Dad came in the kitchen. The sugar bowl missed him, too! Dad laughed and told me to clean up the mess before Mom found out.

We had a big upright freezer in the playroom and at night if I knew Lyn was coming around the corner, I would hide on the side of it and jump out and say Boo! Each and every time I would scare the daylights out of her.

And the grandaddy of all mischief - one day my parents were gone and Lyn and I were chasing each other around the house, we were teenagers this time. The downstairs bathroom door had a knob that if you unscrewed the outside knob you could go in the bathroom and not be bothered. So she was chasing after me and I ran for the bathroom. I quickly unscrewed the doorknob and got into the bathroom just as she was almost able to get me. I slammed the bathroom door shut..... and there was absolute silence. All I remember is seeing stars. About 5 minutes later I came to with Lyn pounding on the bathroom door frantically. When I had slammed the door it made the ceiling fall down and it knocked me out. Lyn and I cleaned up the mess and I don't remember where we stashed the evidence, it couldn't of been in the trash can because our parents would definitely know that plaster was an odd thing in their trash can. We didn't say a word to our parents and about 3 days later Dad was sitting in the bathroom and for some reason looked up. The next thing we heard was "Alice! What happened to the bathroom ceiling?????"

Oh so many memories!!!

I tried to enlarge the above picture so that Lyn and I are more easily seen. I hope it isn't too fuzzy. I have on the white shirt.