Happy Birthday, Joanne!

It's May 3! 5 years, 5 days and 10 minutes before I arrived on Planet Earth, my sister, Joanne Goers, arrived. She was the last of the family to come out of Arkansas. My parents lived in Tulsa by the time I arrived.

We grew up in a little 2-bedroom house 3207 East Archer in Tulsa. Joanne and I shared a bedroom on the front of the house -- the one with the poison ivy growing in the flowerbed just outside the window. There was a huge honeysuckle vine growing on the fence just outside our room. The house was heated with a floor furnace in the hallway. On cold mornings, you would find all four of us lined up on the furnace. For Joanne and me it was almost like doing the splits to stand over that furnace. Funny, it doesn't seem like such a stretch now. I don't remember how old we were when our Dad bought the first window air conditioner. It was small, loud, cold and in the living room.

When we moved to the house on 106th Street where our parents lived out the remainder of their lives, it was really an event that both of us had our own bedrooms. We still had a window air conditioner for the first few years there, though there was central heating.

Joanne graduated from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa in 1958, 3 years after we moved to 106th Street. Through all the years since, we've had times when we were very close and times when we lived far apart and didn't see each other much. It's too bad that we had those distant years -- once the years pass, we can't get them back. But we have changed the present and the future! Now, with Mike and Joanne in St. Peters MO and us in MN, still miles apart, we're probably closer now than we've even been in our adult lives. I'm so glad we have the good relationship that we have now.

Joanne and Mike have had a tough year physically this past year. With God's blessings and help, we're hoping this year ahead will be a great one filled with blessings and lots of good health. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOANNE! Have a great day, a great year -- and let's party when we finally get together in Oklahoma in July!