To the editor: Chester a very special community

It has been 40 years since our car accident.

On Nov. 29, 1979, my older sister Lisa. 13, and my younger sister Kathy Jo, 8, and I, 11,  were waiting for the school bus across the street from our house. A car came around the curve, slid on black ice, landed on my two sisters and threw me across the street into our front yard. Lisa’s ankle was severed and she had broken vertebrae; I had a broken arm and a concussion; Kathy Jo had almost every bone in her body broken. She died that day.

To this day, I can see the car coming at us. I have always wondered, if I could have, why I didn’t push Kathy Jo out of the way? That morning, she and I had a fight, about the last bowl of cereal. I told her that I hated her and I wished she would die. Forty years later I remember those words so clearly. Choose your words wisely.

I am very grateful that my mom was in the kitchen when this happened, and never witnessed the accident. I am very grateful to the town of Simonsville and Chester  — for the kids that got off the bus that day to help take the car off my sisters, and for the girls on the bus helping me and going to tell my mom what had happened.

In the midst of all that turmoil, I feel like we were permanently bonded with the people of Chester. Wonderful people in that town.

Mindi Sheldon Piasecki