A Visit from Sarah

We've just had a fabulous weekend with my cousin Sarah, who is in Utah doing field research with some of her students. She's a geophysics professor at the University of South Florida, and they are here mostly studying volcanic formations in the San Rafael Swell a few hours south of us.

It was fun to hear about her research, but it was more fun to just hang out with her. Sarah is a few years older than me, and I've looked up to her as long as I can remember. We don't see each other very often, but when we do, we just fall into this great, comfortable relationship. Despite the fact that we've always lived at least a thousand miles apart and usually more, I've got so many good memories of experiences we've shared and the conversations we've had.

Lots and lots of summers at Lake Geneva--swimming, sailing, making up plays, watching marathon slide shows of trips our grandmother took all over the world. Traveling in Europe together when I was 17 and she was spending her junior year in Munich--visiting Dachau, hiking for miles along the coast of Wales and in the mountains of Switzerland, hitching a ride with a crazy Scotsman and his wife, lots of museums, trains and beer gardens.

Meeting up in Seaside, Florida, with our kids and on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Hanging out with her in Boston whenever I was home visiting my family and she was studying at MIT. Crashing for the night on the boat she and her family lived on when she was teaching at William and Mary in Virginia and Roger and I were on a year-long runaway adventure in our red Jeep.

Celebrating when she and her husband adopted their two children, and relying on her wisdom and experience as we adopted our Jack. Both envying and being inspired by her passion and tenacity as she kept herself in fabulous shape with lots of long distance biking and running, expertly sewed her own clothes in high school (in contrast, I spent most of my efforts at my mother's old, old sewing machine cursing under my breath every time it jammed), learned to speak German fluently, earned her Ph.D. and then subsequently earned tenure.

I think, though, that one of the reasons I love hanging out with Sarah is that while all of her achievements are genuine, she is also very genuine. She's willing to share the frustrating and nerve wracking bits of her life with me.

I love knowing people that inspire me to be a better person. And not only do I know Sarah, I get to be related to her!