She was ten years old when I was born, and I never knew life without her. I don't remember any sibling rivalry, perhaps because she was more my protector than my peer at first. She helped with my bath, fed me when Mother was busy, and showed me off to her friends. When I was bigger, she took me places and made sure nobody picked on me.
I remember that she took me with her to visit high school when I was four or five years old. I sat in study hall and drew pictures with her colored pencils and circles with her protractor. I thought it was great to move from class to class, and I remember that her teachers made a fuss over me. I got the feeling Evelyn was proud.
I knew I was proud of her! She was the highest scoring forward on the girls' basketball team, and I couldn't wait to grow up to be like her. I liked her brown hair, her saddle shoes, and her boyfriends. I'm not sure they were all that crazy about me, especially when she took me with her on her dates. "Those guys won't want your little sister tagging along," my mother would tell her. "If they don't want her around," I'd hear her answer, "they don't want me either." And that was that. I knew I could grab my roller skates and go to the skating rink one more time.
I got quite good at roller skating. But I didn't get good at any other sport. The first day of school was always great for me. My sister's reputation as a crack athlete would always precede me, so when recess came and the kids chose up teams for softball and basketball, I'd always be the first chosen. That was the first day.
The second was another story: "We'll take Sam; you can have Gloria." "No, that's okay; you can take her. We had her yesterday." After that I was always the last to be chosen. I resigned myself to the fact that I was uncoordinated and too nearsighted for good depth perception. But I began to show promise in other areas, and it was my sister who always cheered me on.
When I won my first speech contest, she was the first to brag on me. When I was elected president of the student council and tied for valedictorian of my class, she cut the article out of the paper and had it preserved in plastic. When I failed or came home broken-hearted, she was the sympathetic shoulder to cry on; when I succeeded she beamed from ear to ear.
When the calling of my life took me into more public arenas, there was never a shade of jealousy or distance from her. She loved my husband and my children as her own family and helped me through pressured times in ways I could never explain.
Her husband Dave was like a brother to me and made sacrifices few men would make to keep my sister and me together. When my mother was no longer able to keep up with the schedules of our teenage children while the Gaither Trio traveled on weekends, Evelyn and Dave made a complete career change. At a stage when few couples would take such a risk, they moved from Michigan to Indiana to be the stability we could count on.
Evelyn was a Junior High School science teacher. Most of the time if someone was looking for her at school, they would not find her and her students in the classroom, but outside under a tree picking up leaves or acorns for leaf collections or turning over stones in a nearby creek looking for tiny crabs or observing tadpoles and frogs. Two of our grandsons (her nephews) who went into fields of science say they credit their interest in science to their aunt Evelyn.
Our mother's illness and ultimate death from cancer was a bittersweet process we shared together. It made me love Evelyn all the more to share the experience no one can put into words, the experience that left us orphans. After Mother’s death we were all that was left of our family of origin. We held to each other more tightly than ever, treasuring every stolen moment together--each opportunity to share insights from what life was teaching us, each exchange of cute or brilliant antics of our grandchildren.
She was a Virgo, and was somehow connected to the soil. Anything she planted grew just to please her. We traded plants from our gardens in the spring and gave each other seeds in the fall. We took trips to the nurseries to buy new breeds of geraniums or to find unusual perennials. But deep in my heart I always knew that the rarest thing we'd ever grow was the deep friendship that would never die with any season. Someone has said, "You can't take it with you," but I was convinced that what my sister and I had grown together was already being transplanted in the perfected Garden of Eden on the sunny banks of Jordan.
