Never Had to Have a Chaperone, No Sir

I was four and Much Older Sister was five when our parents brought our Much Younger Sister home from the hospital. In the intervening half century we've all grown up, married, acquired possessions and professions (one of us is an honest-to-goodness doctor with prescribing privileges and everything), had children (almost a dozen of those, distributed among the three of us) and grandchildren (half a dozen, the market on which seems to have been selfishly cornered by only one of us, hrmph), and shared laughter and tears and hugs and fears.

This weekend we shared our very first sisters' weekend ever.

I'll probably be talking about it all week, but I'm still too delighted by the experience to pull a coherent theme out of the overnight trip.

Maybe the theme should be mattresses, which a night in a bed and breakfast convinced all of us need replacing in our own homes. Yes, we pulled the sheets off to check the brands of both the mattress and the bedding (oooh, so comfy) so we could try to duplicate the blissful rest in our respective homes.

Or maybe the theme should be good grief, what is up with the small town where this bed and breakfast is located? We're all Kansas girls, so we know that most small towns have a tinge of decay on the wind and to really enjoy them you have to acquire a selective blindness to empty storefronts and count your blessings if there is a greasy spoon open during the lunch hour. But in this town? We SHOPPED. And we ATE. And we SHOPPED SOME MORE. There were so many people downtown that we had to look for parking places. Also, according to the town's website, we could have gotten free dog registration in January, so there's that. This town is doing something right, is what I'm saying.

I could do a whole post on Things We Tried On, including antique hats and some really old-lady-ish beautiful knitted slippers Much Older Sister brought everyone as door prizes.

We talked, then we slept, then we ate, then we talked, then we shopped, then we talked some more, then we ate, and we talked, then we hugged each other fiercely, tightly, and promised we would do this again because we truly are the luckiest women in the world to have each other.

We said that the only thing that could have made the day better would have been to have our mother with us, too, and then we realized she'd been there the whole time.

Truly. The luckiest women in the world.