For better or worse, we don’t necessarily choose who comes into (or stays) in our lives. For better, Deb came into mine in the spring of life, when I was just a small town boy living’ in a lonely world, falling in love with her big sister. Soon after meeting them, she and the love of her life extended their friendship to me. First, they looked askance at this weird kid, then accepted and finally embraced me.
Thirty-three years ago they invited me to pile into their brand new 1990 Isuzu pickup with a camper shell for a road trip to San Isabel National Forrest in Colorado. It was an AMAZING trip. One of the most memorable of my life. The first time I had ever seen a real mountain, breathed alpine air, felt the chill night in the middle of summer! I never knew such experiences existed. New experience after new experience. It put me in the mind of Jean George’s, ‘My Side Of the Mountain’ wherein a young boy named Sam escapes to the Catskill mountains and lives on little more than his wits for a year by making a home in the burned out hollow of a tree. Every morning, I would get up early, hike in the wilderness and imagine that I had escaped my droll reality to a life there in that paradise. On one of those walks would I cut a small sapling into a walking stick. Long-forgotten, they thoughtfully saved this and recently gifted it back to me.
Every time I drive over Raton Pass on the southern border of the state, I remember the first time in that little pickup at 7800’ with those two dear friends-soon-to-be-family. We laugh together when the trip comes up and Deborah Anne points out that I had eaten the trip’s entire stash of homemade chocolate chip cookies before we ever left the great state of Texas. In my defense: 1) The cookies were delicious and 2) Texas is HUGE! Debbie & her heart understood John Muir’s famous statement: ‘The mountains are calling and I must go'. She and her family would answer that beacon many times in the following decades.
The second of three sisters, she has always been an upbeat, outgoing and infectious personality with a rapier observational wit. Always the constant and stable mother-figure, it took me years to believe the stories my wife would tell of her wild side before she settled down to care for a family and raise two rambunctious boys.
Growing up as I did with two sisters, it was an easy transition to include a new one in my life and as my own siblings and I grew distant over the years, she proved to be a wonderful surrogate-sister filling that emotional place in my heart. It has always brought me especially great joy that Debbie brightens my own wife’s disposition so and their relationship is perfectly portrayed by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women. If my own love is Jo, then Debbie would be analogous to Meg… maybe a dash of Beth from time to time. Perhaps sisters understand each other in a way that one one else (especially brothers) can. Neither she, nor those like her, realize the feelings of envy that many women feel toward families like her own. Not perfect by any stretch, but thoughtful, engaged and always always connected. I like to say ‘thank God that love is temporal and not geographic’, I have truly seen love defy time and space between my wife and her sisters.
Rich in the possession of a good man's heart, Deborah raised two children, drove trucks, roofed, baked cookies, worked disaster relief, started (& retired from) a career as a white-hat and now in the third chapter of life in this existence, I see her face new and terrifying realities. Always one to wear a brave face (what mother isn’t), you’d never know monsters stalk in her shadows. I suppose something else she is teaching me is that it isn’t the looming threats or realities that define us, but the faith we exercise when we face them, confident, as my dear sister is, that victory will be ours.
I wish words could heal us, they are the only power we have.
“Beauty, youth, good fortune, even love itself, cannot keep care and pain, loss and sorrow, from the most blessed for...into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and sad and dreary.”
Louisa May Alcott ~ Little Women