My Sister and I started out as birds of two different types of feather. We did not recognize one another’s plumage. Her hue was too ‘sweet’ - mine too ‘loud’. The inability of the young to perceive the subtleties of color led to years of conflict that eventually became an acceptance that we would just “never get along”.

Many years passed. Birthdays, graduations, weddings but then - the babies. My first nephew was born and he was lovely, Early stages of molting must have started to show but we still could not see it. Her second baby – a girl. And then, I had PickleBoy all the way down in Melbourne, Australia. It was time to fly home. One day as I was struggling to pack up our little house and to mother a yawing little prune of a baby, the phone rang.

It was her. She said something like, “Bring that baby home to me. I am so excited, I miss you.” She doesn’t know that I sat down after that call and just wept. Something inside me had changed. There is no way to express how the flight back to one another has altered my path in this life.

There are so many stories about the good times we have shared since but do you see that photo above? The word missing is ‘bird’. When we took this picture we were being silly and quoting from one of our all time favorite movies – Dumb and Dumber. We laughed and laughed after this strip spit out of the machine. We must have looked like two crazy and beautiful birds of a feather to anyone who was looking on.

Now go give some love to hula seventy – she started this Photo Booth Friday thing in the first place and I suspect she has a few beautiful feathers of her own.