Boo

I think my little sister might be the coolest person I know.

Okay, so this post has nothing to do with the Peace Corps, or with creepy crawlies or food crises (neither my own and those of the country where I'm serving), but it's pretty much the only thing on my mind today.

Really, the girl rocks.

We were best friends when we were little, and though we subsequently spent a good deal of time rolling our eyes at one another and dishing out extra-cold cold shoulders, most of my favorite childhood memories have that little peanut of a girl by my side, her wild blonde mane and painfully adorable dimples making her just about the cutest thing to have ever tromped barefoot through the top-soil piles of Montana.

On one of many family camping trips. I'm the boy in the raft.

Back when we were little, the two of us spent uncountable hours lost in our own well-synced imaginations. We built cities for our Beany Babies that had fully functional commerce systems, including the concepts of scarcity and supply and demand. We weren't allowed to have a trampoline (they were too dangerous, a fact later proven to us in high school), so we found a possibly more dangerous way of turning young and sick trees into human slingshots instead. We devoted a significant number of days to trying to rehabilitate the near-kills of our ultra-successful-killing-machine cat Missy, and for those we could not save constructed a bird and rodent graveyard in the forest behind our house.

Visiting Susan B's house on one of the most epic historical exploration trips ever conceived of by a home schooling mother.

She was a devoted side kick, and though she let me get away with torturing her in the name of science for a good deal of our time together (I wish I could say tooth extractions and twisty-tie braces were the whole of it), I was also always keenly aware that she had an unflappable moral compass. She has always been generous, has always been loyal, and she has always had an uncanny sense of right and wrong. Sure, she's as stubborn as they come, but that has primarily manifested itself in her refusal to be anyone but herself. Even when that peanut self grew into a tall, athletic, stunningly beautiful woman, she maintained the kind of individuality and integrity of spirit (and biting sense of humor) that most of us would for personal reasons like to think is a myth.

And now, more than ever, she a rockstar. The girl is unstoppable. She does really, really important work. She holds herself to standards very few people would dream of setting even in highly unrealistic New Years resolutions, and then she meets and exceeds them. The girl actually changes lives.

I've known for some time now that, as her big sister, not only am I intensely proud of the woman she has become, but I also look up to her now too.

Two years ago at my college graduation