A friend asked this week which Thanksgiving holiday we celebrate — American or Canadian.
Both!
One of the best parts of becoming an American citizen was to get two official Thanksgiving holidays in one season. Of course, we celebrate with thanksgiving every single day. So, at the start of Thanksgiving week, we give thanks for the most important people in our lives.
I give thanks every day for my little sister.
Brandi (right) and me, posing at my wedding. (Jeff Vinnick photo)
She’s not my sister by birth, but by choice.
Brandi Booker and I met when she was a child, and her mother wanted her to have a “big sister” in a house full of boys.
She was in her pre-teens, and shy. I was in my early 20s and learning how to overcome shyness.
We were shy at first with each other, too. Kind strangers brought us together, and we were committed to learning about how Big Sister/Little Sister pairings work.
I met her mother, and her brothers, and promised — yes, promised — that I would do my best to be a good sister to their precious girl.
Brandi and I grew together. At first, it was just an hour or two a week, seeing a movie, going out to eat, or window shopping.
We learned how to be a Big Sister/Little Sister. We were timid at first, and ultra-polite in that sweet way common to girls-who-will-be-women and women-who-once-were girls (OK, I was the girl-who-refused-to-grow-up.)
This wasn’t always easy for either of us. I didn’t have children; she lived in a house full of youngsters. She was in elementary school; I was working hard to establish myself in a highly competitive career.
We discovered our differences were blessings: I had lived on a farm most of my life, and was learning how to be an urban career woman; her young life was all inner city.
We had adventures together in the country and city. We built a dollhouse. (And if you know either of us, you would appreciate just how remarkable that was.)
Brandi visited my home in the country, with its chattering blue jays and two Husky/collie puppies. I visited her inner city home, aching sometimes at the gulf between our lives away from each other.
And yet.
I admired Brandi from the moment we met. She was facing the world, without blinking. She was quiet yet strong in ways that impressed everyone who met her.
Brandi today.
My family adored her from the beginning, especially my Mom.
Brandi was so elegant, even from a young age, and poised — unlike any other girls we knew in that age group. Frankly, unlike me, at any age.
Whenever I introduced Brandi to friends, they always had that same impression: Such quiet reserve, such beauty.
Everyone thought she was a professional model. She was a high school student.
Brandi has always had the kind of beauty that cannot be manufactured or bought or faked. She has an inner beauty that is extraordinary, and a deep compassion for others.
This is nowhere more evident than in motherhood.
Emerald-eyed Jaden as a baby.
I was with Brandi when her first baby was born in Toronto, meeting the dad and a boy with wide eyes so green that he just had to be named Jaden.
I was astonished by how much love I felt when I first saw him. The first time I held Jaden — on Toronto’s Front St., on a sunny morning — I looked at Brandi and laughed to discover that my heart could grow. I fell in love, in a way that doesn’t compare to romantic love or decades-long, familial love.
Work took me far away from Brandi when her daughter was born, so I missed the early years of a lovely girl named for a French perfume. We all laugh that she was born a diva. I loved her too, from the first, sparkling, time we were introduced.
Diva-turned-teen.
Brandi and I live on opposite sides of North America, so don’t see each other often. But every time I speak to her and the children on the phone, or we connect through social media, I feel my heart move.
When I was recovering in hospital from near-death eleven years ago, a letter squeezed through hospital security (and, even stronger, my family “guard”). It was from Brandi’s mom.
This girl, these children are ours, she wrote. They are our future.
I won’t reveal the intimate contents of that precious letter, but know this: It helped me live.
With gratitude to Brandi and the Booker family … for everything.
planet gratitude 