My little sister Irma, is younger than me by little less than a year. I think it would be safe to assume that you could infer that we have a lot in common. And yet we don’t. My sister married when she was nineteen years old to her first and only sweetheart Lalo. I married the first time at 26 and the second time, well in my forties. She has three wonderful kids, two already married and she is the grandmother of two precious kids. I, miraculously, became a mother at 38.
My sister Irma is the hardest working woman I know, even now. She seems tireless and undefeatable. She is passionate about her husband and kids. She has survived breast cancer. Most of the time I’m in awe of her. She and my mother are the two toughest broads you’ll ever meet.
As a child, Irma was physical and a free spirit; my spirit was a timid spirit, practically voiceless. Irma fearlessly cycled on the dirt hills across the street from the house we rented in California. Her ambition was to have a ten-speed sports bike, which she got for her fifteenth birthday. I was quiet, had no friends and no interest in the outside world. I lived for my music and my books. My sister was playing “comadritas” with our mother and making her home on each branch of the big tree in our front yard. The higher branch was her kitchen, that one to the left, was the living room and so on. If I ever ventured outside I would quietly walk around the house. Seeing the tree as a tree I was incapable of the magical thinking so typical of children.
As we hit teenagehood, Irma discovered she liked to read too, but that didn’t bring as any closer. While I was captivated by Harriet the Spy and Sara Crewe, my sister discovered Nancy Drew. Later she was into Danielle Steele and everything Harlequin Romance.
I would sometimes borrow her Nancy Drew books or her romance novels. That is how I came upon a book titled Collision Course where Rosie and Luke fall in love, in spite of her initial hatred toward him. I was hooked by this story, so much so that I borrowed another one from Irma, which did nothing for me.
I quickly realized that it was the author who enamored me so. I became addicted to finding as many of her books as I could. Her name was Jane Donnelly. If Jane wasn’t the novelist, all of my sister’s romance novels became worthless for me.
Of course the plot is totally formulaic, ideal for a young girl to imagine and dream about love and the mate she wishes will discover her when she becomes an adult. I too wanted my Luke and my Adam (the hero from A Man Apart). Every story was the same: A cute girl with a kind heart and hard working has reached independence and is probably in a stable relationship that is aiming at marriage when in He comes. Mostly always an outsider, brilliant in his field (writer, archaeologist, etc.), untoppable really, almost a celebrity. A man whose intelligence has not blinded him to ultimately see the value of a girl like Rosie or Abby. There is always some miscommunication or a messy situation that distances them and seems to indicate that the relationship will not make it, but at the end, He can only love her and she was born to be the woman of a man whose intelligence, stature and self-sufficiency she cannot resist.
In my thirties when I moved to San Antonio, my now husband found out about my affinity to Jane Donnelly. Raúl made it a point to go to second–hand stores in San Anto to hunt down any and all of Jane’s titles he could find for me, to the point that I have several of those books from my teenage years. Every now and then, when I have a fit of nostalgia or a desire to remember (relive?) my youth, I will bring them down and read them all again, as voraciously as then.
Oh Jane, my Jane, you knew me well!
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