Okay, I Love You, Bye...

I love having my sister back in Maine, but perhaps my favorite part of our relationship continues to be our seemingly endless phone conversations. I think we do our best sisterly work over the phone.

It doesn't seem to matter if she is in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Alabama or Texas. It doesn't impact the quality of our calls if I am on the road in Connecticut, in a hotel in Boston, Rhode Island or Saratoga Springs, New York. It never slowed us down when I was at a huge sales convention in Orlando, or regional meetings in Columbus. We simply are a well oiled telephone communication machine. We talk just as fast, laugh just as hard and are baffled by our family just as much, while we are on the phone, as when we are in person.

We conduct all sisterly business over the phone with the same intensity and focus as a live meeting. We review web site designs, business collateral fonts, potential business product lines, family photos, and Myspace goings on, over the computer while on the phone. We talk over each other and into each other's sentences. We share family and friend news and gossip, update each other on our lives, jobs, pregnancy, births, travels and relate disbelief and opinion, insight and share humor.

I am not sure that our mates quite understand. Many a time my husband has come out on the deck in the wee hours of the night to find me on the phone, laughing until I am crying, and he always just mutters, "You are talking to your sister, aren't you?" I don't ever reply-he just knows.

We have a different way of talking when we are on the phone. Tonight was one of those unexpected, any-old-day, great, long calls. It started with my sister saying, "I'd like to start by saying that I am sorry in advance for calling to tell you this.." and ended with us laughing so hard, we couldn't even say goodbye, we just hung up to the sound of each other's snorts.

In these times of technology, I am so grateful to always be able to hear my sister's voice, no matter how far apart we actually are from one another. That one person who really has been through all of it with me. All of it. From the beginning, or at least since her beginning, four years after mine. The one person who knows what I mean, what I am thinking, and what I will say next, and is already laughing before I say it. Our calls always conclude long after we intend them to, with the sign off, "Okay, I love you, Bye." Consistently. Even when I have to get off the phone quickly to avert my one year old from impending poisoning or traumatic head injury-the words are always said, "Okay, I love you, Bye."

Tonight was a nice night, sitting by myself in the glow of the Christmas tree, with a glass (or two!) of much deserved wine, gossiping and hissing with my Seester, my Sissy, my Poopkins. I am already looking forward to our next phone call. It is getting late, okay, I love you, bye.