The Unit

There are - and stay with me on this - two set of sisters, a mother and two daughters, and an aunt and two nieces in four people known as "The Unit." The name came to us after what seemed like an exhaustive attempt to find a title suitable for the four of us.

We were/are what we consider unique. The Unit comprises 2 1/2 generations, sort of, and we can mix and mingle in any number of combinations while together, and still have all of us included. We'd celebrated  several New Years by hiking to waterfalls, or eating hearth baked bread while we explored Flat Rock NC, or sweating it out on a broken down train stalled in the countryside of France on an overnight jaunt from Madrid to Paris. We've whitewater rafted to celebrate making it through chemo, and stood side by side at funerals, so a name befitting our  relationship was needed.

It was in the dark caves and tunnels of Gibraltar where I feared we might lose each other, that I, as the matriarch of the group, could be heard whisper shouting, "We must stay together. We must move as a unit." I heard a little giggling from the far reaches of a tunnel, then a shout out of, "The Unit! That's it. That's the name for us!" And so, The Unit we became.

The Unit is a somewhat exclusive group. We don't really mean to be, but we are. We're bonded by love and birth in an ageless gathering of women. Me and my daughters and sister, they and their sister and mother and aunt. We are bound. We have expanded our numbers in an honorary fashion with marriages and births, but, I guess until you wear the Red Shoes you may not be fully a member.

They're at least a decade old now, those Red Shoes, but, like us, they're classics. They been shared around among all four of us when only Red Shoes will do. Those Red Shoes have been on dates, and in weddings, and have been to church, but mostly they're pulled out when there needs to be an extra punch in our step. The inquiry goes out periodically among the four of us as to who has the Red Shoes and "can I have them for" ... well whatever the special occasion might be.

The Red Shoes have been shared freely within The Unit ... so freely that I'd almost forgotten about them, until my sister pulled them out for a 2017 Eclipse party. It seems those shoes were raved over all anew. When my sister told me recently that the New York crowd had loved the red shoes, I'd asked, "the old red shoes?"

Yes! But not the old red shoes. THE Red Shoes. Still in action, still making a statement. Still raising us all a little higher with their high-rise, open heels and that classy peep toe. Kinda' like The Unit, doing that raising up of each other with class and style. We rock.