For weeks recently, I was obsessing over the prospect of a block of time now past (March 16-20) loosely referred to as SibFest ’11. Making travel arrangements. Delegating or automating certain must-do everyday tasks because I wouldn’t be around to do them for real (hello, midweek and Friday RAMH posts!). Packing. Touching base with the other participants. Pretending to focus on the day job for eight hours a day…

SibFest ’11 was the second time my sisters, brother, and I turned a chunk of the calendar into an island, insulated by design from our “normal” lives. I’d visited my brother for a few days a couple years ago, and my sisters, too, came by for a day. For SibFest ’11, though, we all traveled to a location roughly midway between New Jersey and Florida.

The plan, you wonder? None. Between arrival and departure, we just winged it.

Here’s what we did, loosely: talked, ate, slept, talked, laughed, talked, ate, drove to the store (or restaurant, or “attraction”), talked, walked around, talked, laughed, slept, talked… Two of us might go out to run an errand, while two of us stayed put. We took some unscheduled time to ourselves each day, with little or no interaction (reading, doing email and other quick online activities, napping). But really, we just made it up as we went along. “What do you want to do now?” “Anybody for a walk?” And so on.

It was great — for me, especially. I mean, I know the other three (who live within an hour of one another) welcomed the opportunity to see me and to “get away from it all.” But when I moved to Florida in ’93 to be with The Missus-to-Be, I never imagined that whole years might pass during which I wouldn’t see Connie, Cindy, and Mike. Not that I’d have decided otherwise, but I never considered the psychological implications of going that long without seeing their eyes light up (or fill, as the case may be). It seemed impossible that they might someday sit at a table with me and talk about people with whom they’ve been friends for ten, fifteen, almost twenty years… but whom I’ve never met.

But that didn’t matter, from mid-day Wednesday through Sunday morning. There we all were at the South Carolina coast.

People who know us have said they’d love to have been a fly on the wall to overhear the conversation at SibFest ’11. But you know what? I think no one but the four of us could have made sense of it for more than ten or fifteen minutes. We fell instantly into the familiar mode: speaking English, yes, but a peculiar sort of English needleworked onto and through a warp and weft of memories — in-jokes, lightning-bolt events in our pasts, old neighborhood characters, things we’d once promised and never delivered, things we’d delivered without advance warning, things small at the time but hugely inflated in retrospect (and vice-versa), wishes and dreams and deliriums and disappointments, people we’d forgotten, places we never got to and places we saw far too often, ice-cream flavors and TV shows, music and gardens, the theater fire, the church, the schoolyard, lilacs and hollyhocks and lacecap hydrangeas, how-come and I-always-wondered transitions, childhood crushes and kids who freaked us out, whatever-happened-to questions, the swallowing up into history of people we’d sat next to for years, first library cards and wardrobe accidents, run-ins with police, misfortunes (and near-fortunes) of love…

The best thing about being alone with the other three? I think it’s the utterly effortless unguardedness. We sometimes talk about competing as siblings — living up to some standard set by one or more of the others — but that’s got nothing to do with how we interact. We don’t have to squeeze words in edgewise. We don’t have to match rhythms, playing catch-up or slow-down. Do, or not, but there really is no try.

What a great, great, great time.

Thanks so much, kids. Love you.