Olga

Not everybody is lucky enough to have an older sister. Older sisters are useful when they're around and mom is too busy doing other things.

Somehow, the responsibility of looking after the younger whelps always falls on the female offspring. Maybe that is what Mother Nature intended. Despite all the brave new attitudes and political incursions into human relationships, it would be logical to think so.

Although I didn't know it at the time, I was a lucky kid. My older sister was in the Sixth Grade when I started school and was a source of endless information, profound wisdom and guidance when I needed it most.

For instance, one bright fall morning, on the way to school, when I first noticed the beautifully colored leaves on the trees and asked her how that happened, she informed me without hesitation that it was Jack Frost who painted them like that.

The picture that immediately sprang to my mind was a little green pixie wearing boots with turned-up toes, flitting about like the hummingbirds I observed in my mom's flower garden in the spring. Clutching a painter's palette board in his left hand, paint brush in the other, he buzzed about busily tinting the leaves on the aspens and willows a bright yellow, those on the currants and dogwoods crimson, and those on the wild cherries a bright scarlet.

The elves, pixies and fairies were always on hand to answer questions people have a hard time with. For instance, they helped my sister to explain the presence of those tiny, perfect, pink, blue and yellow bells that grew in small clumps in the shade of the woodlot at the east end of the garden.

"Fairy gardens," my sister explained.

But it wasn't all about pixies and fairies. Later on, when the teacher at Ft. Pelly School assigned the arithmetic times tables, my older sister took the time to actually drill me on them until I could fire back the right answers almost without thinking. It was a task most kids would have done anything to avoid, but she did it. It was half a century before handy palm-size electronic calculators appeared, and school kids were still required to think and memorize.

Also, there were times when she would have been happier to spend alone with her neighborhood friends without her little brother tagging along, but everyone else in the family was occupied doing something more important. It couldn't have been the most productive way for her to pass her time, but she did it without complaining too much.

I have to assume that my early years would have been a lot less interesting without my older sister's input.

In her 90th year, Olga went to sleep quietly at the Gateway Lodge in Canora and didn't wake up the morning of October 20.

She was a significant presence in the lives of her family, her community and all who knew her. It was a good life, well lived.

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