I LOVE YOU, ANNE

The three sisters at a family reunion.

Let’s hear it for the three Noble sisters…Anne, Cary, and Meg…an exciting piano trio back in the late ‘40’s, beloved for their famous renditions of Mozart minuets. They also did a great Christmas day performance for the Noble family every year until they graduated from college and got married. Thus began the proliferation of grandchildren numbering fourteen.

I hasten to add another sister speciality. All three of us took tap and ballet lessons as young girls. What endured, well into our seventies, was a lively tap version of In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, danced with locked arms, high kicks and much laughter!

Here is Anne in her 90‘s, without a trace of gray hair (I swear, scout’s honor) with Frank, her adoring husband of 68 years…and with me, her adoring sister, outside their home in Peterborough, NH.

This was my beloved older sister, Anne Elizabeth Noble Magill, 97, who left us on April 26, for a freer, more peaceful space that none of us yet knows, but all of us will discover. Anne knew when to go, and she was ready. The whole family loved her intensely, as did a myriad of others who had known and worked with her. The memories are deep and will not go away. Nor will she. Ever…

I remember when I was about eight and I threatened to jump out a second-story window if Anne didn’t give me her new dress. She always got the new ones and I got the hand-me-downs. She shook her head ‘No,’ so I put one leg out the window. In an instant she handed the dress to me. Was she angry? No, she was so gentle to me and seemed only to be relieved that I was OK. I hope I was ashamed, but can’t remember that part. I also remember when she visited me in Germany just after I was married, and we went to magnificent Florence, after which I put her on a ship returning from Europe, and guess what? She met Frank.

Anne was always kind, always the peace-maker, until the time I tried to win over Bud LaFlash, a favorite college boyfriend. That was a tiff I lost big-time!

Years later, when I was living in New Jersey, we binged on New York Theater, using my $3.50 Audience Extra tickets. Hard to believe, eh? Those were the days when we bummed around the city, experimented with oddball restaurants, and even stayed for several nights at a midtown hotel after being given comp tickets. We walked and walked and walked….

We found adventure everywhere. We were each other’s foils. That was special.

And we had been walking places together as far back as I can remember, starting with kindergarten. Miles to school, with Anne protecting me, her younger sister, and making sure at one point that I didn’t get eaten by a cruel man I was told captured and ate children in his old garage on Ridgewood Street. I was not afraid when I was with her.

And then there were all those hiking trips in the White Mountains, not far from our cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in Alton, NH. But the highlight for me was a weekend in Acadia National Park, Maine. Mountains, ocean, blue sky, sunsets, cricket serenades and a small tent anchored deep in the woods. We loved to swim together in the Maine lakes, but screamed with the cold, which was part of the fun. Yes, Anne was fun, a good companion, and eager to try new things.

Over the almost ten decades of our lives together, we played music, climbed mountains, fished, camped, went swimming morning, noon, and night, attended weddings, welcomed babies, raised children…It has been rich and it has never been dull. Nobody could have had a better sister with whom to share all of this. How lucky we were to have had each other for so many years.

Anne, I love you.

Anne, Cary and me with our mother, Grace Kepner Noble, on her 80th birthday.