A Tale of Two Sisters (part one)

Tomorrow my sister Kate and I are having a lunch date with another set of sisters. They are the sisters in question. We've known them our entire lives, and the younger is also considered our little sister. Once again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

One of my earliest memories is of Shannon. She is about six months older than I am, and she and I were "frenemies" long before the term was coined. My Mom always made me play inside of the chain link fence that went around our back yard. It wasn't that I was a wild 4/5 year old, she just had two younger than me and wanted to be sure we were all safe. I hated that damn fence. Vicki would come down the block with her older sisters to play at Shannon's house across the alley, and inevitably she would find her way over and come in to play with me. Shannon always hung out on the other side of the fence to taunt me, and then finally entice Vicki away with something or another. Until one day Vicki told her to forget it, and pretty much stuck by my side for the rest of my growing up years.

When I was finally sprung from the fence Shannon used to push me down ( I was a little thing) and Vicki would clobber her. :) Then as we grew it became the boys. It seemed like I only had to mention a boy was cute and there she would be, "stealing" him away. I was a tomboy, she a girlie girl. Vicki and I would play sports with the boys, and she and Laura would lure them away. They always came back though. That all came to a head in ninth grade. I was "going with" Wally, and one day the Town Crier on the football team told me that he had seen Shannon snuggling up to him on the bus coming home from a game. Since the tattler was definitely going to repeat it I told him that if I ever heard anything like that again I would beat the $#W$ out of her. She confronted me, I confirmed it, and being that I was not a tiny peanut anymore it ended then and there.

Now we did not spend our entire childhood in hostile animosity. There were times of friendship and laughter, pinball machine in her basement, sleepovers, youth group nonsense, walks and talks, and we rode together to High School for a few years. She and I share a common bond that one would not have expected. The man she was going to marry was killed in a car accident. Wally was also killed in a car accident, and although he and I were no longer together, I know that Shannon is one of the few people in my world who really understands.

We live in the same city, but our paths almost never cross. She and my sister are in a singing group together, so really they have more in common and more of a friendship these days. I'm looking forward to seeing her tomorrow, to see how she's doing and where life has taken her. It will be nice to spend some time together. On the same side of the fence.