The Gift of Sisterhood and Sometimes Jewelry

My sister and I have fashion sensibilities that meander along separately and bump up against each other more or less at random. When we were in Italy, she admitted to swiping numerous items from my closet in high school, which just goes to show that the Sisters Stealing Each Others' Clothing trope even works when the bulk of your wardrobe is hockey related and/or colored jeans. (Note to fashion: the latter is why this whole 90s Fashion Revival is a terrible, terrible idea.) Sarah has always been much better at following trends and particularly at the successful application of belts (???) than I have, and I seem to be better at finding and applying classic pieces and dressing them up with non-belt accessories. In that light, it's interesting that this necklace, which I wear all the time, was a gift from my sister.
It's exactly the kind of piece I like - nice color, interesting detail, symmetry (ooooh I love symmetry), just big enough for a statement without being too aggressive. Sarah gave this to me for Christmas about eight years ago and I still wear it on a routine basis - if you follow the Makeup Is Easy posts, you've probably seen it a couple of times already.

Sarah worked with me over winter break, and the commute gave us a good amount of time to catch up. We talked a lot about our family, and how lots of our respective friends have commented on how much members of our family love one another. I sometimes get frustrated with my relationship with my siblings because we don't talk as often as I would like and neither of them ever answers their damn phones (to be fair, I don't always either), but whenever we're together I so enjoy my time with them, and it's like we do talk every day. I'm amazed all the time at what interesting, vibrant humans they are.

In a way, my occasional dissatisfaction with our levels of casual communication comes from a soft, quiet knowledge of how present they are in my life; so many of my stories center around them, and all of those stories - even the ones where one or the other plays the role of Bane of My Existence - resolve into a great enriching influence in my life, without which I would not be the person I am today or will be in the future. The above picture is just a necklace, but that my sister gave it to me years ago, at a much younger emotional age, and with a persistently divergent fashion sense from me, speaks to a larger phenomenon that exists between the two of us.