My oldest sister Mabel, before she became a nurse, was the one we ran to when we stepped on a nail, scraped our knee, got a splinter in our hand, or "couldn't see." Mabel soaked our foot, bandaged our knee, lifted out the splinter, removed the foreign object from the eye. She smiled at our faces and things got better. After a while Mabel wasn't with us anymore; she was away studying to be a nurse. Occasionally, one of my older brothers would drive to Framingham and bring her home but only for a short time, and then we'd bring her back to the Nursing School in Framingham. We enjoyed the ride but were always sad to leave her there. But there were later times, after she became a nurse and later after she was firmly established as an RN and had her own car, that she would take us for rides, we'd sing (she'd teach us the words), we'd read the Burma Shave quips posted along the highway, look for cows in the fields and horses down by a fence and number plates of another state, as the cars whizzed by.
