Over the Puddles and Thru 2nd Ave Subway Construction!

We walked to my sister's house yesterday for Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, we took a cab the sixteen blocks since it was raining, but that doesn't pack as much dramatic punch.  To most folks, neither statement has any sort of punch at all.  But for my entire adulthood, I have lacked the kind of easy, reliable community that having relatives within walking distance represents.  I'm a pretty dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker living in a typically arms-length high-rise.  I'm fond of some of my neighbors, we chat warmly in the elevator, but we do not drop in for tea.  Most of my friends don't even live in the city (and no, Burbswannabe Bay, Brooklyn doesn't count).  My mother moved to Florida the moment she stopped working (apparently it's a law for retired Jews), and my brother and his family live in Westchester.  My sister was an hour's drive away, too, until this fall. Visits took planning, an occasion, a cake, maybe even a new sweater.

Now, if my nephew's printer is on the blink, he can and does drop by.  Or we all catch a flick on Friday night on a whim.  No holiday, no pastries, no Sunday best.  I have my sister back. This -- no overstatement -- has changed who I am.

You see, my sister and I go way back. Kathy looms large and close in my rearview mirror, and I can't imagine having survived my childhood without her. Just a tad over two years apart, we shared a room for most of our childhood. We fought, as all siblings do.  Sat on our beds and kicked the snot out of each other for five frenzied minutes, only to embrace each other, blubbering declarations of love, minutes later.  We were always pretty different, but there was an intense feeling of yin-yang twinship between us right from the start.  Kathy was thin, curly haired, mathematically inclined and prone to anxiety; I was chubby, silky straight, literary and spacey.  She met our various injustices with firm, sometimes fiery frankness, where I was the teary people-pleaser.  But we needed each other all the more for our differences, balanced and complemented each other in ways that helped us feel level and whole in our very chaotic little world, and provided us with a sheltered island of two. We played together constantly, elaborate, often fantasy-based games that embraced both our real identities and our need to escape them.  Doing the wash at the neighborhood laundromat, we were really "Wessy (the way I, the spacey younger sister mispronounced Leslie) and Suzanne," the wildly wealthy sisters with a separate room in their palatial home for every conceivable need -- one for makeup, one for rides, a swimming pool room -- and very little need for parental supervision.  Playing in the waves during our Rockaway summers, we were shipwrecked orphans rising bravely above our sorrow to build ourselves a lovely new beachcombery existence. We performed, vicariously, through our dolls, who embodied whatever pop stars we were enamored of at the moment, as they sang and danced and bowed to thunderous applause, their frilly baby curls and ribbons bouncing.  We shared unspeakable secrets through code words that were invariably mutually understood.  I snuck Kathy food when she was sent to bed without dinner for having done a slapdash job of setting the table, and Kathy sensed -- sensed specifics without my saying a word, not a code -- when an awful trauma had befallen me, and went to bat for me though I asked her not to, and though I knew she put herself in jeopardy.

As the years went on, despite some adult distance and one larger falling out, we continued to nurse each other through child woes, health scares, job aggravations. And of course I grew to love her family, madly. But Kathy and I no longer played, or grabbed a cup of Starbucks and window-shopped in the grown-up version. And though our bond, our shared spiritual umbilical cord was not severed, neither was it nurtured, not enjoyed, nor taken for lovely granted.

But yesterday, we took a cab to my sister's house. We stuffed and schmoozed and laughed, a lot. We did take a walk, after dessert, met up with another friend and her dog, passed so close to my house that my husband decided he would head up and get ready for work tomorrow while I sauntered back to my sister's. I may stop by for coffee and polish off the whoopie pies tomorrow.

I have a community now.  A casual, no-big-deal community. Pretty big deal.