When I look at photos like these, my heart swells a bit:

There's nothing like a true laughing shot for spreading around a little joy.

My sisters are two of the very most beautiful women I know.  Have a gander:

I'm the lucky girl who got to spend ten consecutive days with these vibrant beauties.  My goodness did we laugh.  We laughed till we felt a bit sick.  And then we laughed some more.  I'd forgotten how alive they are.  I haven't seen them on a regular basis since I moved out to go to university when I was 17, but they, on the other hand, have very literally grown up together.  They are similar to one another in most ways.   

I share most (if not all) of their food tastes.  Having married a very meat-and-potatoes kind of man, it's very exciting to me to be able to meander up and down grocery aisles with them, picking out favorites and then coming home to prepare it to find that they love it all too!  We glutted ourselves on poke, something I'd never heard of before, but what is now indisputably one of my all-time favorite foods.  It's a raw fish - most often ahi tuna.  It's cut into cubes and marinated in various concoctions.  I salivate as I type this description.  My favorite is a spicy one sprinkled with fresh roe, but let's face it, I've yet to meet a poke I didn't love, and love passionately. 

We carefully pored through cookbooks and chose exotic salads to prepare.  We ate a phenomenal wheat-berry one that nearly found me swooning.  We ate grilled eggplant stacks with goat cheese and a balsamic/red wine reduction.  We inhaled some amazing tabouleh.  We ate a miso/edamame/soba noodle salad.  And then there was the melon and prosciutto one that was all the more beautiful because we ate it on the beach while watching Jody twirl with the setting sun behind her (Despite the whimsical image this description evokes, it was really just downright hilarious and I nearly peed myself watching it all unfold.  Let's just say that there was some falling involved!).  We feasted on exotic cheeses and the girls introduced me to truffle for the first time (I'm sad to report that despite my very desperate wanting to love it, alas! I didn't.).  We found a favorite new white wine  called Cupcake that we originally bought solely for the beauty of it's label. 

We ziplined, which was a first for me and most definitively a trip highlight.  It wasn't as adrenalin-y as I'd hoped, but it was still so, so fun.  It was, in fact, my Christmas present from JoyBoy this year and it's a gift that I suspect will always rank high as an all-time fave.

We glutted ourselves on sunshine, golf-cart joyrides through places we weren't supposed to be and shopping.  We ran along the beach boardwalk and we did a new exercise class - zumba - which was also a  trip highlight.  I felt like a groovin' latina for a second there.  For the girl who can rarely make her body do what she wants it to do in the realm of The Dance, this was a novel sensation.  For one brief moment, I actually had my torso and my shoulders doing two separate things!

It was wonderful and I don't think I'll ever forget it.

To really know me, it helps terrifically to know my sisters.  There are three of us and we are of the corny 'name-each-of-your-offspring-beginning-with-the-same-letter-of-the-alphabet' genre.  When I'm with them - which sadly isn't all that often anymore - it feels like a comfortable slipping on of one's favorite slippers.  The ones that are worn to a perfect, familiar softness.  Their lives and characters are molded inimitably to my own, even though we live in separate provinces and lay actual eyes on one another very seldom.  We  talk often about favorite things and then delight in discovering that the others have the very same favorite, despite the fact that we've never known it about one another.  For example, I don't even have to ask to know that both of them love Willy Wonka candy and hotsauce and guacamole and capers.   It goes without saying that they will.  I know, too, that they'll both add more lime to their respective guacamoles than anyone else would ever consider doing.   I know they love antique enamelware and eclectic decor that doesn't cookie-cutter anyone else's tastes.   I knew before her visit that J would love the hall of  mirrors I'm in the process of creating.  And my neophyte collection of antique linen.  We're perpetually exclaiming, "Same-ers!" in our emails to one another as some new revelation or other surfaces.  I'm relieved to never have to explain myself in clarification of some misunderstanding or another with my sisters.  They understand what I'm saying even before all the words make their way out of my mouth.  They instinctively 'get' my motivations and my foundational beliefs about life and people.  They look at the world in the same way that I do.  They are free to laugh at me when I'm being ridiculous and their good-natured and accepting way of doing so spares my dignity and shows me that I sometimes value my dignity a little too highly.  These slippers are warm.