Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today is a somewhat rare occasion, a family photo post. I have done them before when I discovered some very early family photos (a few posts of those can be found here and here), but I am not sure I have done many from my own childhood – except maybe in passing to document a toy or a beloved cat.

Today is a photo my mom sent to me, matted and framed, as a surprise several years ago. A cousin had given her two photos of me and my sister as small children. She kept one, which hangs in the kitchen in New Jersey, and sent me the other. This one lives on a shelf in direct eye shot of my “home office” desk. I am looking down and on the left. So like us that Loren is running toward the camera and I am turned aside, a bit diffident.

I don’t remember these matching outfits at all. We were rarely dressed alike, although photos seemed to be taken when we were giving the impression after the fact that it happened often. Probably the outfits were gifts and the pictures documenting our wearing them. These are the sort of typical dresses of the late 1960’s to be expected on little girls. Most of our time was spent in indestructible things like Danskin shorts or jeans. (I had a flowered pair of jeans in red and blue I was especially fond of a few years later. Very 1970’s fashion forward. They live on in my memory.)

We are in a yard I cannot identify – probably a long forgotten, not especially distinct yard where the cousin in question was living. There’s not much to it. Just the sort of suburban yard of my youth where we’d just run around with chasing each other and some imagined foe or friend until exhausted.

I have also rarely written about my sister, Loren, before. I did a tribute to her rugby trophies a while ago (that post can be read here) but I have not written too much about her. Loren Butler (married name Feffer) was born on March 15, 1962 – two years my senior and a fact that I was unlikely to forget. Loren was definitely an older sister. She died after a long fight with breast cancer on January 20, 2003, just shy of her 41st birthday.

She was quite brilliant (a PhD in mathematics), did not suffer fools gladly, and was very athletic most of her life – she had a constant need to burn off her restless energy. Loren was also very opinionated (about all things), extremely generous and extraordinarily loyal. As my sister and fairly close in age, Loren and I had that weird symbiotic relationship that siblings have. Hatched over time in the same protective family bubble of early childhood, we shared experiences and a history that only we experienced together. (My brother Edward entered the story a bit later and adds another chapter to the Butler clan story.)

As we know, death means spending the rest of your life limited to a now one-sided dialog with that person. In this case many of my earliest memories were shared only with her – conversations in bed at night when we shared a room as small children, games and of course epic battles with each other. Her opinions (memories of real ones and now imagined based on her track record) play in my brain. These range from world politics to my most recent hair cut.

Someone contacted her widower about publishing some of her work recently while a recent wedding celebration of a mutual friend was a chance to hear a few stories I had not heard before which is always a good day.

It has been 23 years since I have been able to wish her a happy birthday in person. (For her 40th birthday I gave her gold hoop earrings, still hopeful that there was a future and that she would wear them for years to come. I have those now with most of her other jewelry.) However, she still lives large in my mind and a day doesn’t go by without thinking about her, so here’s to Loren on what would have been her 63 birthday.