Today's always a tough day for me. It's the birthday of the elder of my two late sisters. "Kaye."
She's been on my mind a lot lately, for a lot of reasons.
I've written about her before. If you read either of those diaries, you already know that she was murdered at the age of 43. We're one year shy of the 20-year mark, as a matter of fact.
The mark of a permanent void in my life. And the mark of the point at which our family began finally, irrevocably, to disintegrate. Oh, her death wasn't the cause of that disintegration; that was a lifetime in the making, for all of us. It was merely the point at which the domino, long balanced precariously on edge, finally tipped over.
But today, I don't want to think about how she died, or the subsequent fallout.
I simply want to remember her for a bit.
Oddly, it's the only photo of her that I have scanned into my computer. The others are all in storage.
She was 15 or 16. Hypersensitive about the little gap between her front teeth. Wearing her favorite blue and white dress - your basic '60s shift, just skimming the knee because our father wouldn't let us wear anything shorter. And the color always makes me think of one of her favorite songs - although one that wouldn't be released until a few years after this photo was taken - Love Is Blue. One of the German equestrian riders in the Olympics used the song in her performance. Roy's son and daughter-in-law made a memorial CD in his honor and sent us a copy - and used the song as background music.
Reminders.
In recent years, my marker for feeling her spirit has been a particular butterfly, one I'd never seen here until the last few years:
the mourning cloak. Apt name. It first showed up around her birthday a couple years back. Last year, on the day we got Dom's terminal diagnosis, one fluttered around my head as I carried our little dog into the vet's office. Then, this year, one showed up repeatedly in the three days before Roy walked on.
It started to feel like a harbinger, an omen. An escort.
More reminders.
Today's a little different. The only thing flying around my head today was a large and beautiful lime green dragonfly.
But on her birthday, she brought me a gift. Good only for a day; it leaves us again this evening. But yesterday, Thunder arrived at the head of the storm:
Very close to the all-black horse of my dreams. The one I wanted as a child, when all of us girls had horses. Kaye's was Tossa, a small brown horse. My first was a bay pony, who eventually had a bay filly of her own; the second, an elderly paint; and my third, a young, free-spirited bay filly that ultimately caused my father to get rid of the horses entirely. No, she didn't do anything wrong; our father was just supremely unsuited to dealing with animals.
But my spirit horse, my dream horse, was always solid black.
And yesterday, decades later, she appeared out of nowhere.
Her owner came by this morning, of course. He's coming to pick her up this evening.
But for one day, Butterfly Woman brought me what I most wanted as a child.
And today, for a little while, I got to be a kid again.