For miles around, I believed, there wasn’t a finer sister than my eldest sister, Manang Easther. She was made of a different stuff and was everything we three younger girls were not everything we ever wanted to be. I was proud of my Manang Easther, and my greatest frustration was that I could never be quite like her.

She was special in every way, but I thought the most special thing about her- the one thing that I secretly coveted most- was her creamy, almost flawless skin. The slightest insect bite had the most devastating effect on us younger girls. We were plagued with skin rashes and allergies which festered, leaving their ugly, telltale trademark stamped on our arms and legs. It was nothing unusual; really, every other kid we know suffered the same fate. But not Manang Easther. She always managed to escape unscathed from the hordes of fleas and mosquitoes that accompanied our childhood. Or, if she did get bitten, it didn’t show.

Slant-eyed and light complexioned, she could have been a Chinese mestiza, and sometimes she was mistaken for one. When she was in grade school, there was there program where she was perfect for her role as a little Chinese girl. For the occasion, Mother made her a Chinese collar and a pair of pants which looked like pajamas. I can still see her braided pigtails and bangs that reached down to her eyes, and hear her voiced as s bravely recited her lines. “My name is Ah Wang. I’m a little Chinese girl. I live across the sea.”

The three of us younger girls-well, we were regular brownies, and no matter how hard we tried, we never succeeded in making an impression.

Manang Esther never had a problem with her weight. She could feast all day and not put on an extra, unwanted pound. She was always trim and slim; unlike the three of us who struggled endlessly and hopelessly to attain some kind of figure. There was a time I took to wearing a secret, tight-fitting waist band to give me a little shape. All to no avail .It gave me nothing but a deep, dark ring around my middle. The doctor who did physical students told me to stop wearing it.

She had a high cheekbone and perfectly formed of teeth. Her favorite snack was balikutsa (candy made from molasses which she was an expert in preparing) but I don’t think she knows what it feels like to have a toothache. And while we younger ones suffered the rounds of tooth decay, dental fillings and extractions, she was smiling with close-up confidence all the time, Me, I had crooked teeth and refrained from smiling. When I did it was with a painful self- consciousness.

As if all that was not enough, Manang was taller than the rest of us. She’s over five-four. I am barely five-feet two, my sister Eunice is a bit shorter, and Merli is less than five.

She was just the right size, the right shape, and the right color while we younger three were mostly the wrong. Queen Esther, no less, or the beautiful swan in a brood of ugly ducklings.

“If there was a long list of the great things Manang knew and could do, there was an equally long list of the simple things she couldn’t do.”

Well, she could have been somebody else’s sister!

The differences between Manang Esther and the rest of us transcended the physical. She was smart, too, and possessed a lot of skills important to growing children. For example, she was an expert in catching dragonflies by the tail, or stealing the shy mimosa leaves before they could fold up. She knew the very places where we could find firewood and guavas or kamachile at the same time. She could play “Manang Biday” on a little, one-octave bamboo xylophone by hitting its keys with a couple of dried bettlenuts fastened at the end of two sticks, and she was often asked to do so during homeroom programs. She knew a great many stories about giants and kings, fairies and ghosts, aswang and mangkukulam, and she spent long hours spinning tales for us as we sat in the flowerless flowerbox in an upstairs window waiting for the moon to rise.

When it did, she’d sneak us out of the house, down through the window and over the bamboo fence, to play patalunton with the neighborhood children in the street. But first she had to teach us to fix our beds just so, so that should father decide to conduct an on-the-spot check, he would find us “asleep” in our designated places.

If there was a long list of the great things she couldn’t do. But it never occurred to us as a lack on her part then, only as difference. A difference which only served to set her apart from the rest of us ordinary mortals, making her even more special to our eyes. A difference we believed inherent in her birthright.

She couldn’t go upstairs or downstairs alone at night; it was S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) the one of us younger ones would be in tow. “Come and hold the lamp while I look for my thing,” she would say.

She couldn’t go to sleep at night until she’d personally checked and double-checked the wood stove to live coals. One night while father was away on a trip, she poured a whole pailful of water into a few dying embers; the next morning, mother could not start a fire.

She couldn’t eat fish, big or small, without almost always managing to get a bone stuck in her throat. Several times we had to summon our nurse-neighbor, her namesake, to remove the offending fishbone. Other times we took her to Manong Fred, who was a suni (born with his feet first). Peering with his one good eye into my sister’s wide open mouth lick his thick, short fingers, touch them to the afflicted throat, and the pain would vanish just like magic. Sometimes our cat, Kuning, did the magic trick. Father would take Kuning and rub its paw on Manang’s throat. But our favorite trick was our simple, homegrown, tried-and-tested remedy of secretly slipping a fishbone on top of her head. Someone would hand her banana and a glass of water, and after she had washed down a large, half-chewed chunk, the bone would be gone. We done it countless times, she knew and would automatically reach a hand up to brush the top of her head as soon as it was over. On one occasion Father had to take her to emergency when the combined efforts of Kuning, our nurse neighbor and Manong Fred, as well as our secret method of deboning , failed to bring relief. One time we had malunggay fruit for viand, but no matter, she also managed to get a bone in her throat-a malunggay bone, no less!

One fairly simple thing she couldn’t do was run a sewing machine. We had lived with sewing machines as far back as I can remember (my father sold and repaired them), and we girls learned early and easily to operate one. But not Manang Esther. She’d try again and again but just couldn’t make it go; the machine would keep going back and forth. Well, we younger ones could very well end up being seamstresses, but-no,-sir-definitely, not her!

Another thing she couldn’t do was to take a “no.” Once while we were living in Baesa (Caloocan) and didn’t have money to spare for beauty parlors, she asked me to trim her hair. I didn’t want to do it because I did not have the expertise. But you don’t argue with Manang Esther. So I did my best. When she got a good look at my handiwork, she was so mad that started screaming and pulling my hair. She never trusted me to cut her hair again.

But she did trust me to do something more important, like going to the library at the Manila Central University where she was a medical student to do a research job for her. Wearing her white uniform and her student ID, and, in spite of my fear of being found out, I felt like a million dollars. I kept hoping some of my friends would see me as I waited for a jeepney outside, but, unfortunately, no one was around.

Manang Esther seems to stay forever young. To entertain my husband and me while we were visiting in the US, where she and her family had gone to live, she took us to the casinos in Las Vegas where we tried inserting a few nickels into the slot machines, just for the hang of it.

“There are five whole years between us, but when she introduced me to her friends as her younger sister they accused her of kidding”.

There was a sign which read, “Minors Not Allowed in Casino,” and a guard who had been intently watching approached her. “Excused me, Miss, but are you 18?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I’m more than that,” she replied, blushing lightly. She was all of 40!

There are five whole years between us, but when she introduced me to her friends as her younger sister they didn’t believe her. They accused her of kidding.

When it was her turn to come visiting not too long ago, I had the chance to see her in a different light, but nonetheless special. In spite of the differences between her and me, and between her world and mine, I found out what we do have common interests. These commonalities must have been there are along, but I had probably concentrated too long and hard on the differences nothing else seemed to matter.

One common interest is love of God’s out-of-doors, a passion born out of our lifestyle while we were growing up in Artacho. As children we climbed the hills, roamed the woods and swam in ditches and rivers, and my heart is still out there. I have yearned for the excursions of my youth, but neither my obsession. There is the river a little distance from our home which I look at with longing each day we drive past, but my suggestions-sometimes pleadings, other times naggings- to go for a dip have invariably fallen on deaf ears.

The first thing Manang Esther asked me to do during her brief interlude with us was to accompany her to the hills, which I was only more than happy to do, naturally. On her last day, it was a bit warm in the afternoon and I asked her-tentatively, not wanting to impose, fully aware that she has a well appointed swimming poll and a jacuzzi in her backyard-did she want to go to the river?

Of course she did!

“Why did we not come here earlier?” she said as we soaked in the cool, clear, sparkling waters and contemplated the woods and mountains that surrounded the place. “I could stay here forever.”

I smiled secretly I could, too. Manang Esther may be different, but at heart she is very much like me. The 30 years she has lived in the US as a medical practitioner might have been reordered her life and her wardrobe, but not her soul. The next time she comes to visit, I know where I’m going to take to her: to the kamachile woods to gather kamachile fruit. I’m sure she’d love it.

Well, she could have been somebody else’s sister, but, you see, she’s mine. And am I glad!