Missing someone

I made a lemon polenta cake. I've blogged about this cake before - it's a Nigella Lawson recipe I found on a website looking for lemon cake recipes. It looks beautiful and yellow but it only really comes to life when you maks the syrup with squeezed lemon juice and sugar and pour it over the cake while it's still hot. Then it sings. It is a huge hit with vanilla ice cream or since you make it with a scarey amoutn of butter, just scoffed straight down on its own, with a very large mug of milky tea.  Usually I am first in line for a slice - this is one of my own personal favourites - but this week I have been visited by a lot of people who have taken it upon themselves to bring cake, biscuits and chocolate, for no very obvious reason, and therefore I am spoilt for choice. Why this sudden rash of visitors? Really, no reason on their parts. On mine, though, I have been craving company. This week, nothing at all has triggered a feeling of intense loneliness, that has its roots in the fact that I really, really miss my elder sister. For many years I would talk to her almost every day, usually at around 7pm - we would both have got in for work, changed, and have just begun preparing dinner for our respective families. What are you making, she would ask, and I would tell her, and she would advise me on her take on the menu, and then the roles would reverse and I would run a commentary on hers. Invariably we would go from there to discussions about the best cakes we had ever made, a conversation that would go on for years. Only then would we get on to talk about the family, how this one and that were doing. When you talk to someone nearly every day for years, when that stops, the part of you that looked forward to that conversation, and enjoyed it so much when it was going on, and would relive bits of it afterwards, feels abandoned, bereft, lost. Nobody can fill that gap. I talk more often to my younger sister, but we are all different characters, we played different roles, and my elder sister, as the eldest, was the Carer. You had a problem? You talked to her. You wanted to share a joke? You talked to me. etc. Problems don't stop when you suffer an enormous bereavement. It's not like Fate decides you've had your share and it's time to move on. So with no elder sister there to advise, and nobody who could fill that unique space of making the time for you without thought, offering you deeply partisan support, and warm words, whether you acted on them or not - well, every time I have an issue I would love to run by her - or actually just a great cake recipe, or a dinner dilemma - it is like ripping off the Elastoplast and digging around in the wound. There has been quite a lot of that this week and my dearest friends appear to have sensed this and acted on it, as much as anyone can help with the utter despair of being forced to confront the reality, over and over and over again, that something has happened that you cannot change, influence or reverse. My sister is gone. I don't want for shoulders to cry on, thankfully. But the unique place she held in my life, well that has been slow to close itself up since I lost her, a bit like your stomach taking a while to register that it is full, while you are still stuffing yourself.  All this cake looks really lovely. I just really, really miss her.