Kissing Cousins

Recently I read on Facebook that my cousin had turned 60. This seemed incredible to me. First of all without applications like Facebook, the day could have passed without me noticing at all, secondly that the day I would turn 60 loomed a mere 6 and bit years away. That gave me pause for thought. But not for too long lest I scared myself witless! Holy shit! 6 years! Neither of my parents had lived beyond 61 and none of us kids have so far made that holy grail. My cousin, on the other hand came from much longer living stock so the fact of her turning sixty was what I peferred to focus on.
Those six years that separated us as children so that we were never really children together, we still had a major influence on the lives of the other. I was only two when I convinced this cousin that she should never have children, something she thanked me for about fifty years later. Apparently I was sitting in a highchair at the time squishing a banana through my fat little baby fingers and smearing it all over the place. As she watched in absolute revulsion, my cousin swore that she would never bring a baby into the world.
While I was busy being a kid and a rebel teenager, my cousin was a child of the sixties and her actions sent ripples down through the tom tom drums of the family gossip line. She kept her maiden name after she married, one of the first women I knew who did that. She even dared to suggest that her husband take on her name as she was supporting him through University at the time. While she scandalised and amused the family she also paved a way for me, her life showed me that there were more possibilites for girls in the world than the nuns and my mother led me to believe.
She traveled, she studied and lived in China,she broke boundaries and lived her own life and in doing so was an shining example of a woman born of that time.
In adulthood, our paths have rarely crossed but when they have, I am thrilled to see that childhood distance shrink to the size of our commonly held beliefs. One thing I appreciate and honour more and more as I grow older is the blessings of role models in my life, they are still breaking ground for me! And today I honour the woman who has unknowingly been a role model to me since the day of the squashed banana, Happy Birthday Sally Ann!