Sisterhood

The other day when the girls were supposed to be cleaining their rooms (ahem) they somehow got engrossed in creating timelines from pennies.

We have a quart jar filled mostly with pennies, foreign currency and other coins that we use to keep the bathroom door from blowing shut. I knew there were some older pennies in that jar, so they made a second timeline.

The oldest penny they found was from 1940. I had thought there was an older one, a wheat penny, that I remember finding in the cattle pen on my grandmother's farm when I was a kid, but they didn't find that one.

I love that my girls still spend so much time together, despite their four-year age difference. I was worried about how their relationship might change when Sarah decided to go to high school full-time last year, but their bond remains strong.

Don't get me wrong, they still argue like fishwives at times, make each other cry and fight over whose turn it is to scoop the litter boxes. But they also enjoy spending time together watching old Disney movies and musicals, playing computer games, creating elaborate Playmobil civilizations, and listening to me read fantasy books.

I am not close to two of my four sisters, a situation I have attempted to remedy but to which I am now somewhat resigned. While I may have accepted that I can't change the situation, it still makes me sad.

I hope my girls will maintain this closeness throughout their lives, to support each other in good times and bad.

And if their relationship falters in adulthood, I hope they'll remember when they searched out wild garlic to share and dueled in the backyard with kitchen utensils, and realize you're never to old to need your sister.