Amen Sister!

I'm just home from a trip to the homeland, an annual trip with my sisters for earl Christmas shopping and crafting. We eat great food, follow each other on errands, we gossip and laugh a lot. We tell lots of stories. We check our impressions of how things are with each other, and reckon our memories against each other's.
Last week at HoFo, someone with only one sibling asked me what it was like to grow up in a large family. She said "did you never get lonely, did you always have someone to talk to?" I remember that there was always at least someone at home, and if there wasn't always someone to talk to, there were always tales to listen to. I told my HoFo group how much I loved to get hand-me-downs from my sister, because they had cool clothes that I would never be able to buy for myself. Getting a pile (or garbage bag) of clothes from them meant I was getting older, coming closer to who they were, closer to a time when I could wear colors and styles beyond what seemed like constant brown nylon.
Now that we're all older, I can see more and more how alike we are, the way our DNA is distributed among us, and how being children of our parents has formed us into the people we are today. We're different from each other, too- but you can't miss that we're related. Together with honorary sister, we have a lot of fun and share a lot of memories. I look forward to this trip every year.
Now I'm home again (jiggety-jig) and waiting for Scott to gt home from his junior-senior retreat and tomorrow morning we launch into another crazy week. Suddenly now it's almost Thanksgiving and almost time for snow and almost time for Advent and Christmas. The leaves are all off the trees lining the highway and now I can see all the orange bittersweet that has been hidden underneath. I love Bittersweet, and love the idea of it growing in amongst the green leaves all Summer, and then showing itself in big orange clouds in the trees and brush when this time of year rolls around. It's a bittersweet time of year.