My siblings - NaBloPoMo 3

Prompt 3 - do you have siblings?  what are they like?

I have an older brother and a younger sister.  My brother and I were two grades apart in school and grew up together.  My sister came five years after me, and was six grades behind me, so we were never in school together and I recall very little of her (which feels awful to say). 

I would say that my brother and I were very similar in many ways for a lot of years, and we were quite good friends for a long time.  Somewhere, probably in our 30s, we underwent a significant divergence in our views.  I know this is slanted with my own feelings on the subject, but it seemed that I responded to experiences outside my comfort zone with acceptance and an expanding view of the world as being in shades of gray, while my brother seemed to pull back into a much more conservative, black and white world.  We are wildly divided on our religious and political views, though I think we both work hard to avoid those topics and maintain a connection, despite our differences.  I enjoy time spent with his family and I hope he would say the same.

My brother is a dentist (and a good one who doesn't inflict pain!), a Harley rider, a hunter (new hobby in the past few years), a card player, a basketball player, and a hell of a Scrabble player.  I suspect he'd love to still play Dungeons & Dragons, if he had a group to join him.  He is a good singer and a natural musician.  Sometimes I think he takes himself too seriously, but he has a good sense of humor when he lets it out. 

As I said earlier, I don't have many childhood memories of my sister.  She was always there, of course, but just part of the background in many of my memories.  She was always a happy kid and I don't recall fighting with her (though my mother might).  By the time she was in high school, I was gone to college, so my "memories" of her teen years is filtered through stories I heard from my parents.  She was the wild child of the family - breaking curfew and running around with her friends.  One summer when she was in college, she went to work in Glacier Park.  I had a job with an 800 number, so she started calling me.  We got to be friends that summer, and have been best friends ever since.  My oldest nephew publicly refers to us as the 'crazy aunts', which we learned when we helped host his graduation party last year.  Folks say we talk alike - we know that and are spooked frequently at how we are forever saying the same thing at the same time - but they also say we look alike which is freaky.  I think they are nuts but we hear it all the time.  We talk most mornings on our way to work and often in the evenings too.  I consider her daughters to be nearly mine, and I hope she feels the same about my girls. 

My sister works in marketing and she is hugely creative.  But beyond work, the rest of her time is dedicated to her three kids and their activities.  She is the best multi-tasker I have ever met and I'm often exhausted just hearing about what she has going on day in and day out.