There were six of us, plus Marshall, who wasn’t one of the Russell siblings but might as well have been. He practically lived with us. Every morning he walked from his house down the road to ours, appearing just after breakfast when our mother would shoo us all outside to play until lunchtime. From the […]

It was just to be a post-vaccination brunch to bid my oldest brother goodbye. He and his girlfriend were moving to Colorado to be near her daughter. A late-in-life change, a huge one. But also a happy one. A sunny April day, nothing short of a miracle, and I packed my “famous” Basque salad in […]

From childhood to adulthood, I lived with a misconception about my place in our family. We Clarkes were a tightly knit band of four: mother, father, son, daughter. My brother was the third generation with the same name; I was the first girl with my grandmother’s family name of Claybrooke. The uncles and aunts and […]

I have tried to imagine how I would feel as an 8-year-old orphan traveling with a man posing as her uncle in search of a new life, but it is so hard to fathom what that would be like. In 1909, my grandmother was a brave young girl who did exactly that. She traveled by […]

I am the eldest sibling in my family. My brother, Jeff, is three years younger than I am, and my sister, Jennifer, seven years younger. We all grew up together in cramped quarters in a very small house. Invariably, we all got under each other’s skin quite frequently. Typical sibling squabbles. Money was tight, so […]

For the first year and a half of my life, I was the sole recipient of my mom’s and dad’s affection and adoration. From the day my brother joined our family, I was disheartened to find I would have to compete for my parents’ attention. When I turned 4 years old, I decided our family […]

Near the end of the time during which my youngest sister, Harriet, was able to adequately communicate, she called me every weekday afternoon at exactly the same time from her seat in the van going home from adult day care. She got off the van at Sunshine Market for her husband to take her to […]

Since the inception of the “holiday” National Siblings Day, my four siblings and I inevitably shout out to each other our gratitude for our relationship, forged in our tribal need to keep our parents happy and at bay. We are Irish twins: five kids, seven years apart. And boomers. We grew up with many children […]

My sister and I are five years apart in age. We were both adopted and are not biologically related at all. She always knew she had siblings and in her 40s she tracked them down. I went with her when she met her two 100 percent biological sisters for the first time. She arranged to […]

As a child I identified with the “old woman who lived in a shoe.” I was not the old woman. I was one of the “so many children, she didn’t know what to do.” Our mom was a devout French Catholic, let’s start with that. I was No. 3 in the birth order, and the […]