Sharing a nest — a tale of two sisters

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“You’re so dramatic,” she says. “I’m moving eight minutes away.”

“It’s not the same,” I say.

Today is moving day from my house. She’s only one person, but she has major stuff — big stuff, a lot of stuff, more stuff than you can imagine — in the basement, in her room, in the den and in one of the upstairs bedrooms. This is besides all the furniture and boxes that will be delivered to her new house from storage by real movers.

She looks around this morning in her very relaxed way and says, “I guess I’ll move all this stuff out over the next few months.” I channel my inner Kim Jong Il. “If you go, all this goes with you,” I say, and with that my husband and I and Meryl and her man friend start packing boxes and dragging stuff that ultimately fills two vans and two cars.

For reasons I will never know, Meryl had bags of dried gourds from her East End garden in my basement. And boxes of beads from her craft years, and a dozen Tangle Art books from her Zen tangle years, and several new pairs of size 4 genuine Indian moccasins, still in the original boxes, and cake pans under the bed, and several bags of old clothes that she meant to give away two years ago.

There were two 50-pound busts of minor Greek gods, several industrial-size rolls of fabric and dozens of plastic containers from the days when she brought her lunch to school. Not to mention a ponderously heavy metal towel warmer. She never leaves a home without it.

We fill the vehicles and drive to the new house and begin hauling cartons.

Meryl and I came from the same nest (our 90-year-old mother). We lived together for 20 years before I left to get married, and then again these last four or six years. It was a turn in our lives that neither of us expected, and it led to this sweet interlude.

Now she is thrilled to have her own living space, and especially her own cooking space. As she says, and I admit, in Randi’s house, it is Randi’s kitchen. I am the self-anointed culinary queen and there are no other members of the royal family. I’ve done all the cooking these years, and I’ve loved it. Meryl says that the grub has been good, aside from a preponderance of kale in recent health-conscious years.
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