My Sister is Better Than Yours :)

By the time this blog has been posted, it will be January 22... my sister's birthday! If you don't know her, her name is Elizabeth and she is pretty amazing. We are right about three years apart and some people say we look a lot a like. True, we are pretty much the same size and shape and we both have brown eyes, but the physical similarities end there. I think we are more alike on the inside! We are both kind people, voracious readers with soft spots for animals. We have the same manners and sense of humor. We are both procrastinators. I think we are both quite protective of the other.

Of course, there are differences. She is stronger and braver than I am, and much more outgoing! Her beauty and kind smile make her much more approachable than me, who has a somewhat.... prickly demeanor at times. Her food palate is much tougher and more sophisticated than mine. She is the fastest reader I know! I don't know if I dilly-dally while reading or what, but man, she knocks those books out quickly!

But in spite of our differences, or maybe because of them, we are very close. She is undoubtedly my best human friend, and I am SO grateful that I have her. We have been through a LOT together- my health problems, her health problems, family problems, moving, the loss of loved ones... I don't think I'd have made it without her.

We have words and names that mean special things just to us: smat, ex-aww-stid, Sisyphus, Paul Giamatti, Mose. She knows I love the show Mystery Diners, just as I know she adores The Office. She's perfectly okay with me hating Justin Bieber, just like I accept her hatred of Dave Mustaine. We love each other's animals, and make fun of them too. I always poke and jiggle her cat Flo's ample stomach and Emmy calls my cat Sheldon a "mama's boy" and says he "bleats like a goat".

We like to share books and movies and music and TV shows... she is responsible for my obsessions with Big Bang Theory, Supernatural, AND Game of Thrones! Just today we shook hands and agreed that I would read Watership Down if she reads A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

True, we squabble sometimes... we are sisters! She once put a big, hairy spider on my backpack (and STILL denies it), and I might have once or twice interrupted phone calls to her mid-school boyfriend, singing and playing "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog" on my acoustic guitar over the phone, to her horror.

But despite it all, here we are! Closer than ever, and always supporting and sticking up for each other. It is her birthday, and I couldn't be more grateful that I have her!

Happy Birthday, Emmy!!

Love, SaSa

P.S. I can't wait to give her her present! I spent a long time on it and WOUNDED my finger making it, an injury that has been mercilessly mocked by our father. I will post pics, I promise! :)

Inhale!

Isn't it crazy how a smell can affect you? Just a whiff of something can change your mood in an instant, or transport you to another place or another time.

It happens to me every day that I go into work at ACE. I always enter through the rental shop, a cavernous room filled to the double-garage doors with worn-down tools, greasy rags, cluttered shelves, deconstructed chainsaws and a deep, swamp-like pit covered by a metal trap. There is always music playing, the genre decided by who ever is working that day. It is always grimy, it is always cluttered, and it always smells like home to me! A permanent smell of gasoline and oil has seeped into the soul of the place, clinging to all who venture there. A constant aroma of heavy machinery and hard work. I grew up in and around the rental store, so that gasoline smell is comforting to me.. familiar. It's the smell of the shop my sister and I used to play in when we were little. It's the smell of hugs from my dad. The smell of my Grandpa's garage. The smell of calm and safety. I know some people don't care for it, but it's one of my favorite smells in the world.

I had always heard that scent is the strongest sense tied to memory, but I never completely believed it until it was proven to me. One day I bought a new perfume and just a day or two later, I read The Hunger Games for the first time. I stayed up late into the night finishing the first book, then immediately read Catching Fire and Mockingjay in the following few days, all while wearing this new perfume. Now every time I wear that perfume, I smell it and think of Panem and Katniss, and how wrapped up in the books I was. I inhale the scent and, just for a second, my heart feels different. I feel that bittersweet sadness of finishing the first book and despairing about how this story could possibly turn out favorably, but loving it anyway. For just a moment, I'm back sitting on my bed, neck aching from being bent over the book all night, reading from the light of a purple Walmart lamp, no sound but the whisper of pages turning. And then, like waking up, I'm back in reality,smiling at the memory.

Another one of my favorite smells (and what inspired this blog!) is that first scent you breathe in when entering a Barnes and Noble, that warm aroma of coffee and the intoxicating scent of books. The bookstores are always quiet, kind of like libraries. People here and there amongst the shelves, thumbing through the pages, or standing reading magazines. Customers chat idly at tables, sipping their coffee drinks, surrounded by piles of beloved books. To me, there really is no place on earth like a bookstore, because of the limitless realities that surround you, just waiting to be explored. Thousands and thousands of books sit on shelves, eager to be read, to be enjoyed. A place you had no idea existed can suddenly become available to you- worlds opened up to your imagination.

Experiences are what life is made of, and each experience has its own feel, its own story, its own scent... we just have to smell them!

Sorry I missed Wordsday Thursday last week, guys! I was in Tulsa hanging out with my family, so... sorry, not sorry! :P

I hope you all had a great New Year!

Sarah