Where, Oh Where Has My Little Sis Gone?

"Oh Where, Oh Where Can She Be?"

When we were young, and still the centers of our own universes, my sister and I wrote letters. Dutiful, sisterly letters. It wasn’t that we fancied we had anything beyond parentage and nationality in common. We didn’t. The gaping chasm of six years between us blinded us to any common interests. But we did stay in touch. Especially after I got married and blithely betook myself to the other side of the world. Leaving her, at the tender age of sixteen, to cope with “situations” on the home front as best she could. Truth be told, it never occurred to me that problems in the grown-up world might be any of our concern……. She was young. She was brainy. She was gorgeous. If I thought about it at all, I figured she’d be fine. Besides, we came from stoic, taciturn types and if she wasn’t fine she’d keep it to herself. Not to mention that there was another tall, gangly, taciturn type-in-the-making lurking in the shadows who could be relied upon to take her away to the seaside with her bucket and shovel if things started to get out of hand.

Then along came the children, and the letters dwindled to a truly miserable, barely discernible trickle.

We were up to our oxthers in poopy diapers and runny noses, pink eye and ear infections, PTA meetings and doctor’s appointments, sneakers and wellies, schoolbags and lunchboxes, supervising homework and helping in classrooms, living and loving, laughing and lamenting------turning into grown-ups------on opposite sides of the world.

When we finally came up for air, the world had changed. We’d changed from girls into women who were mothers, the boys we’d married had turned into men who were fathers, the babies we’d borne were no longer darling extensions of ourselves but- gasp- individuals with ideas and aspirations of their own. We’d been over-worked and underpaid and seriously sleep deprived for so long, we didn’t know if we could survive in, and adjust to, this strange new order.

In between the great gaping gaps in communication, we’d been thrown together by the deaths of, first, our dad, and ten years later, our mum, may they rest in peace. And two overseas assignments which took us respectively to Germany and Belgium, which if you’ll look at your atlas, you’ll see are MUCH closer to Ireland than, say, California, or Montana! And I gradually came to realize that I had a treasure, right there, under my nose, masquerading as my no-account, bothersome kid sister.

So, you can see, e-mail and the internet came along at exactly the right time for us. After we overcame such technicalities as my distrust of new-fangled gadgets and anything electronic…….

And then, the icing on the cake, blogging! I was in heaven when she finally caved and started a blog of her own. Now I could tap in regularly to what she was thinking, not just the tailored-for-me content of her e-mails. It doesn’t get much better than last November’s NabloPoMo, when I was guaranteed a Rise fix every day for an entire month…..

And now all’s quiet on the Notimetodonothing front. Those old dinosaurs are turning into fossils. And one asks oneself

“Where did she go?” and

“Doesn’t she have anything more to say?” and

“Hey! Get back here---you’d just got me hooked!” and

“Don’t trifle with me---post something already!”

It’s all due, I am sad to report, to a death in the family. The sudden and unexpected demise of Rise’s computer. It was so young. Barely two years ago it came to live with her in it’s shiny new box; so promising…... so lovely…...and such a lemon. Those in the know opine that it must have been a Friday afternoon/Monday morning job.

The computer specialists have been to her house. They've examined the patient. They've poked. They've prodded. They've probed. They've stood around the sickbed, stroking their beards, and have sadly shaken their wise and grizzled heads and pronounced it well and truly a goner.

As you can imagine, Rise is distraught at her loss. She even succumbed for a while to a mysterious virus, and took to her bed. But, occasionally, her daughter’s computer was left unguarded, and she snuck on there and snooped around, and subsequently wailed to me that it’s DEADSVILLE in the blogosphere of late, and someone needs to do something about it! She has plans to procure a new machine and when she does, watch out! She’ll come roaring back, with knobs on.