gwyn | A gift from a friend (Reply)

About a year ago, zebra363 sent me an email telling me that she'd planted a tree in my twin sister's memory on her new property in Australia. It was one of the most thoughtful and touching things anyone had ever done for me. She's sent me progress reports and pics since then, and I thought I'd share them with you, because it's a year old now and still going strong. Without even knowing it, zebra also picked the most perfect tree -- first of all, it's Australian, and my sister had been planning to go there and New Zealand fairly soon, before she got sick. It was a lifelong travel dream for both of us, and she had a book full of notes on what she was going to do. Second, it is a lemon-scented gum tree -- so not only is it an Aussie native, it's citrusy, and she loved citrus smells like crazy. We grew up in a very mountainy, hikey, campingy, tree-huggery family with huge tracts of forest property in this state, so trees were kind of a way of life for us -- which made this an even more apt memorial. Thank you again, zebra.

Zebra mentioned to me at the time that she didn't even know my sister's name, so I told her, and sent along a couple of pictures that her friend had taken at her last birthday party. It's hard sometimes for me to look at those pictures, knowing I wasn't there for our last birthday. It reminds me of my failures, though I think she probably had more fun without me around fussing over her and worrying. But a couple people have mentioned they've never seen a picture of her, and these are the only digital pics I have. (Well, technically there's one other one, but it's awful and I don't even look at it anymore.) I will have to figure a way to scan some of my older pictures or get grabs from the videotapes that my dad made (mostly, though, the tapes show her putting her hand up to the camera). Anyway, these were taken a few months before she died, so are not the best representation. For many years, my friends would joke that they didn't think I really had an evil twin, that I was making her up, and my biggest regret is that I don't have more pictures of us together after a certain time -- we felt like we'd been "twin photographed" to death, and that we wanted to be individuals... you just never know what's going to happen. If I can scan the last photograph of us together sometime, I will post that, too.

	This is the little tree when it was first planted.
	This is the most recent pic, with lots of mulch around it to protect it.
	This was the midway point, with it's little protecto sleeve to shield it from the hot Aussie summer sun. (I think, anyway, but I could have flipped the above pic and this one!)
	This is a rainbow zebra caught. My sister's tree would be in the foreground area.
	And another beautiful shot of the rainbow. I'm not a believer in the afterlife, but a part of me wants to believe she's keeping an eye on her tree. There's a little red dot that shows the approximate location of her tree.
	This is the last birthday party. With her is the hubby of the friend who took such amazing care of her -- and he did a lot, too. I don't know what dad and I would have done without them. The thing on his forehead is a lips sticker -- they had confetti and stickers and goofy hats and such. He was always such an amazing sport, and my sister adored him.
	This is a hard pic for me in some ways. She smiled a lot, this big face-breaking grin, but she looks so different here, with the sallow skin, the way one of her eyes kind of closed after treatment, the wig, all of it. But if I try to look past that, this is the way I remember her when she wasn't bickering and quibbling with me and bossing me around!