It happened again today. Sandy and I were out together and someone asked me if we are twins. Yes! I have a twin sister. Well, actually, not a twin. One of us is a little older. Well, actually, not a little older. One of us is 13 years older.

OK, it’s me. When I was 13, my baby sister was born.

Shortly afterwards, my Dad pulled me aside. “Rhonda,” he said sternly. “Sandy will be watching you all the time. You really have an opportunity to influence the person she will become.” And that is true. As the (much) older and (much, much) wiser sibling, I clearly had an impact on her life. Unfortunately, I squandered that opportunity. I’m not sure she learned much from me except to bite her fingernails, a disgusting habit we both struggle with nearly 50 years later.

Every girl needs a sister 13 years younger. Because of the age difference, you never have to share a room growing up. You rarely get compared to each other. You never have to wear each other’s hand-me-downs. You don’t fight over the same friends (boys or girls). There is a little babysitting required, but how hard is it to babysit with someone who thinks you are only slightly lower than the angels? Someone who will behave because she doesn’t want to risk losing the chance to hang out with her big sister. Someone who will occasionally embarrass the crap out of you. When I was a junior in high school, my prom date appeared at the door in a tuxedo that looked exactly like the one my brother wore as ring bearer at a friend’s wedding. “Oh!” Sandy said in surprise. “Have you come to marry my sister?”

No one looks at you the same way a much-younger sibling does. Sandy thought I could do no wrong, a sentiment not echoed by my other siblings. Certainly not Onna, 2 years younger, or Eric, 5 years younger, or even Alan, 8 years younger. Not only did they know I could do wrong, but they carefully honed their skills to get me blamed for their misdeeds. OTOH, Sandy was ecstatically happy when I came home from college for visits and was supremely disappointed when I didn’t return to share her room on a permanent basis when I graduated.

Sandy and I grew up in different worlds. In my days in elementary school in the 1960s, we studied reading, writing, and how to sit under your desk with your arms over your head to avoid exposure to radiation in case of an atomic bomb. The only computer we’d ever heard of was the gigantic mainframe Dad worked on at his job in Oak Ridge. I read all the time, mostly books about boys having adventures solving mysteries or exploring outer space. We watched The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies on TV and wore dresses to school every single day that the temperature was above 20 degrees. (If the temperature was below 20, girls could wear long pants – NOT JEANS – under their skirts.) In college, I typed my papers on a fancy IBM Selectric typewriter that we bought when it was retired at Dad’s office.

Sandy grew up on The Brady Bunch and Happy Days. She also read a lot (I’d like to claim that as another influence, but I think in both our cases it was Dad). Unfortunately, still most of the available books were about the exciting things that happened to boys, although since our friend Henry Reeves told her if you kissed your elbow you’d turn into a boy, she hadn’t dismissed the possibility of someday having those adventures herself. Dress codes were a thing of the past. One time Sandy told me about something that happened on the playground at school. The girl involved, Sandy said, “EVEN HAD ON A DRESS!” as if that were the most bizarre behavior she could imagine. Although desktop computers existed, there were certainly none at Sandy’s high school in Wilmington, NC, and they existed only in computer labs at the University of North Carolina.

Mom and my aunts made Sandy cute polyester outfits when she was little. (Yes, polyester. They’ll never die.) Every outfit had a tiny pocket on the left side. I assumed it was to gather the rocks that every child collected en masse, but Sandy explained to me later that it was to hide her left hand, which due to a problem in her development was smaller than her other hand and somewhat misshapen. One day she came home from kindergarten all upset because a boy had refused to hold her hand when they stood in a circle. It never happened again though:  Her friend, Wes, protected her for the next three years by always sitting on her left so he could hold her hand. That is the last time I remember her complaining about it. She quilts, she juggles, she plays the piano as well as or better than any of us siblings. When she was applying for something years later, I asked her why she didn’t fill out the section about having a handicap. I’m not sure she knew what I was referring to until I explained. “That?” she asked incredulously. “That’s not a handicap. It has never stopped me from doing anything.”

I had a car accident when I was 16. A fender bender really. No one was hurt and the majority of the damage was to my self-esteem. I came home and cried. And cried. And cried some more. Finally, Sandy came in with one of her favorite stuffed animals. “I brought you Brownie to make you feel better,” she told me.

I went away to college when she entered kindergarten. Thirteen years later, for a brief time we lived in the same town. But she was a newly-married college student and I was a 30 something single parent working fulltime, so our lives didn’t intersect much. One year she planted a rose bush beside my driveway as a surprise birthday present. Every time she did something to her roses, she’d come to my house and do the same thing for mine. Most of the time I never knew it. I thought, “I don’t know why people say roses are so hard to grow. There’s nothing to it!” I found out the hard way after she moved.

In the intervening years we lived hundreds of miles apart. Lots of stuff happened during those years, and most of it was not a bit funny. I’ll write about it sometime, but not today. In 2014, Sandy and her now wife, Jennifer, moved to Staunton from New Jersey. I moved to Staunton from North Carolina in 2017. And confusion ensued.

Honestly, I don’t think we look that much alike. We have similar body types. Our hair is cut about the same, although mine is curlier and she has a lot more of it. I tend to wear skirts, she wears jeans. She is taller. I have more wrinkles. I wear glasses all the time while she’s just started using readers. We both drive Hondas, although hers is a zippy orange Fit and I have a staid, silver Civic.

I have no trouble telling us apart. Apparently, I’m one of the few. It started when Sandy sent me to stop by a bakery on my way out of town after one of my pre-move visits. The owner, a friend of Sandy’s, did a doubletake when I walked in. “Oh,” she said, “you must be Sandy’s sister.” I felt like a celebrity. Little did I know how often I’d be mistaken for her.

I met a woman leading an exercise class at the Y. “You’ve been in my class before,” she said. Uh, no, that’s my sister.

The worst was at the assisted living facility where our parents lived. No one there could tell us apart. It didn’t help when Mom and Dad introduced us to their friends with the wrong names, a habit borne of 50 years of trying to keep five children straight. One day the lady at the front desk stared at me as I signed in for a visit. “I get it,” she said after some thought. “You’re the OTHER one.” Turned out Sandy was already there. Most of the staff and residents didn’t try to get the name right even if they remembered there were two of us. “Where’s your sister?” one lady asked every time she saw either of us. Occasionally we’d show up together and freak her out. A gentleman told us fascinating stories about his military service. He certainly didn’t know which was Sandy and which was Rhonda but he remembered who heard each story. “I’m going to tell you one I haven’t told your sister,” he said to me more than once.

One time a clerk in a store told me I looked familiar. “Oh, that happens to me all the time,” I told her. “You probably know my sister.” We discussed Sandy at length and finally came to the conclusion that they didn’t know each other. I have no idea who the clerk thought I was.

Among Sandy’s closest friends growing up were identical twin boys who looked exactly alike to me. “How do you ever tell them apart?” I asked her once. “Chris and Russ?” she asked in surprise. “They don’t look alike at all.” Perhaps you just need to really get to know identical twins to see beyond the similarities.

I don’t know what it would be like to really have a twin, but I imagine it is very special. My friend Teri (who was first Sandy’s friend Teri) summed it up like this: “My twin is a daily reminder of who I am. Good and bad.” My friend Katie described her relationship with her fraternal twin sister, Karen, this way: “We always had each other,” she wrote, “Whether we were nice about it or not, the other was always there and I know that became a comfort to me in times that I was scared or sad. I knew Karen would always be there! Packaged deal!”

Wow, maybe Sandy and I are twins. I know, she’ll always be there for me, encouraging me to test my limits, to do my best no matter what I try. Recently she sent me a note about a book I suggested she read. “I’m enjoying the book,” she wrote, “but you could write it better.”

Does this count as a thank you?