well fed and satisfied.

In February I was finishing up my senior year of college.  I drove down south to North Carolina to visit my sister, a high school Spanish teacher, and her husband for a long weekend and she surprised me with some tremendous news.

We drove out to pick up my brother-in-law from work and on the drive there I asked her how she'd been feeling.

"Eh, alright.  I haven't been sleeping well."

"Stressed at school?" I asked nonchalantly, examining the cracks in my fingernails as she made a left turn.

"No.  I'm pregnant."

There is no way to describe the emotion that coursed through me at that moment, followed by the insatiable thirst I suddenly had for words that would not flow.  I don't remember really, but I know I must have gaped and stammered at her like a middle school boy when he first tries to give a book report to his English class.  After a funnel of emotions, some screeching and some physical bursts from my arms and legs, we were at her husband's office and I think I finally cried.  We hugged for a while and I made all kinds of ridiculous claims about the wonderful things I would teach this niece or nephew. My sister, two years older than me, always the pioneer into things unknown to us, was the mother of her precious unnamed unborn child.  I was overwhelmed.

Over the course of the next months, I neared graduation and, unsure of my life's destination, decided to move down to North Carolina to live with my sister for the summer--our last hurrah as kind-of-kids, pre-real-adulthood.  We decided that, for some reason, bearing a child ushers you into true adulthood, whereas college graduation merely ushers you out of the season of perpetual and constant "hanging out."  

On May 2nd I graduated, and on May 3rd my family ate an enormous brunch at the hippie co-op diner in my college town, packed up a truck and my Honda Civic, and moved me four hours south to North Cackalacky.  

Now it is nearing the end of August. My sister's baby is due September 6 and she has begun to resemble a moving truck--a car's width from the back, but there's that huge nose that juts out the front and renders the driver blind to anything within twenty-five feet of it's front wheels.  She ain't makin' it to nine months, sister.  

And as she prepares to embark on this journey of motherhood so promptly, I know that it is time for me to shape up and ship out.  The time is also right for me in the season that I am in to move to the city where my fiance lives, to the place where I wanted to live from the beginning.  But I feel sort of drenched in homesickness for my sister already because I will mourn her daily sweet company so deeply.  

I sat on the back porch just the other day, thinking about these past four months and the unexpected opportunity we have had as sisters to live together again after six years of living so far apart. It occurred to me that I have a sort of stair-step view of events and circumstances, a belief that most things and events in our lives are stepping stones to the next balcony, to the next open door through which we are beckoned to walk and discover an entirely different and somehow more wide open room.  However I realized that this summer, these months of living with my born best friend, was a place without an exit door.  It was simply a back porch under a shady oak tree, a place where we could sit and enjoy the beauty of the day without having to move on.  Perhaps I will learn something in the future that I have not yet seen, but I believe that the reason for my living with my sister this summer was not to prepare for some other thing or to move me forward or to challenge me through growing pains to maturity, though I'm sure we have both grown.  This summer was simply a gift of time and relational richness with a woman who has always loved me and whom I will always love. 

I will remember this summer with my sister for our visits to the farmer's market and our mornings with coffee and our Bibles, our trips to the gym and the first time that I saw her baby roll around inside her belly making rolling waves on her swollen abdomen.  I'll remember how she made molasses cookies so the house would smell like it did when we were kids and how she would come and crawl into my bed with me when her husband was away on overnight business trips.  I'll remember how sweetly she smiled while folding her unborn baby's clothes when she first washed them with anti-allergenic detergent, our frequent trips to TCBY for soft serve frozen yogurt and how she would remind me to bring my lactaid pill.  I'll remember sharing small sips of red wine that she pined for, the way that she sniffled every morning because of year-round allergies and the way that she made that concentrated face when she painted water color fish for the nursery, the way that her stomach protruded from her t-shirt when she painted the living room.  

I will remember and count myself rich for the simple summer I got to spend with my big sister.