After more than a year apart from my sisters, I felt a real need to see them. Not just a hankering to be with them but a longing, as if drawn and tugged toward them by some gravitational pull.

As siblings, we share the same roots, the same memories and some of the same attributes. No wonder we can pick up where we left off within minutes of our reunion, resuming our laughter or our storytelling as if we had visited the day before and the day before that. Why, we swap recollections the same way we do recipes and photographs, and most of them go far back in time, when we were merely sisters, not wives, mothers or grandmothers.

On the plane the other day, I excitedly told my seat mate about the anticipated reunion and how long it had been since we three had seen each other’s familiar faces.

She knowingly smiled, then related to me her similar eagerness to see her “sisters,” her soul-mate sisters, she said, whom she meets once a year in someone’s home, either in California, Louisiana or Maine. Five of them, dating to nursing school days before she settled in Millinocket and they scattered hither and yon.

“Sisters under the skin,” Kipling may have dubbed them, these retired nurses in their 80s who have kept in touch all these many years and who have looked forward for months to their annual soiree.

“Have you ever been in the September heat of Alexandria, Louisiana?” I asked. “It won’t matter,” she replied, “as long as we’re together.” What’s a little heat or humidity, she reasoned, after all the planning that had gone into her trip, including arrangements her family made to care for her ailing husband back home so she could see her friends?

Sitting beside this remarkable woman, whose career spanned decades, whose three daughters also became nurses, I could envision her “forever friends,” those school chums who had shared a special time in her life.

And I could see them laughing until they couldn’t stop; I could see them unlocking doors for each other; I could see them changing each other’s lives, lifting each other’s spirits, guiding and cheering each other on, holding each other’s hands – seeing each other through.

There we were, both traveling to see our sisters, biological or not. As the small sampler hanging in my bedroom reads:

“Chance made us sisters; hearts made us friends.”