Yesterday I got a text from my sister asking if I were free to chat. We played phone tag a couple weeks ago and the game faded before we actually connected. I called my sister immediately after receiving her message and she picked up the phone, laughing. “You didn’t need to call right away,” she said.

Actually, I did. I love my sister to death, but she doesn’t know that because her communication with our family has been so erratic since she started college, we have an unspoken policy of dropping everything to talk to her when she decides it’s a good time. My mother, who normally goes to bed by 11:30, has been on the phone with my sister well past midnight if that’s when my sister calls. My father, who normally rushes around from meeting to meeting, will postpone everything related to work to call her back. So even though I’d just walked into the house and was halfway upstairs to say hi to my roommate who was working from home, I paused my hello, went back down the stairs, and called my sister.

We had a long, lovely chat and I was glad that we did. It was good to catch up with her, and to learn that she’ll be home for a week at the beginning of June. She’s preparing to spend a year in Spain and I’m preparing to spend two in Malaysia, so we commiserated about the difficulties of getting paperwork in order and applying for visas. Now that she’s done with college, we also talked about her studying for the GREs, summer research with a professor, and her first date with someone outside her peer group. Life really does start to happen in a totally different way after college, and it was refreshing to talk about that with my sister. I do enjoy living vicariously through her tales of concerts, parties, and get-togethers (she is a much cooler, bolder, more exciting person that I ever was) but interacting with her as an adult is a nice change. We’re both getting ready for adventures abroad and I’m glad to share that experience with her.

As they say, “I smile because you’re my sister and I laugh because there’s nothing you can do about it.”