Audree Kropen

Repurposed technologist

We were sisters, 2.5 years apart in age. She was the older sib, although we were just one school grade apart since Robin repeated Kindergarten. We shared a room at first since we lived in a two-bedroom garden apartment until I was five years old. We put up a homemade room divider as a way to claim our individual spaces.

Our childhood was not an easy one. There were many reasons for this:

- Our parents were inexperienced with children.
- Our mother was an only child.
- Our father had an older sister, but he assumed a parental role when his father died at a very young age.

Robin fought hard for our childhood freedoms. I was able to just walk through all the doors that she managed to pry open. In the summer of 1964, we took an 8-week trip across the country from New Jersey to Los Angeles. There was a lot of time spent together during that trip. Fortunately, I have pictures of that trip that help to keep the memories fresh and I have started to write about this in a SibsForever journal entry.
As sisters, we were quite competitive. Robin was a very talented pianist. She could play "by ear" and transpose music easily. I admired that and tried hard to achieve a similar musical mastery. But I was the analytical one who saw everything as a math problem, so my potential was limited. I can still visualize her sitting at the piano in our childhood home.
This set of framed paintings were displayed above the upright piano in the living room of the house where we spent the majority of our childhood. Yes, we had our own rooms by then. Robin's room was painted blue and mine was pink. I have these framed pictures along with many other pictures that have traveled with me over all of these years.
Robin died when she was 14 years old, quite suddenly and unexpectedly. I was twelve. It's now more than a half-century later, but it remains the single event that has most impacted my life and who I am today