Kirstie was the best sister imaginable when i was a kid. She was helpful, and kind, and very loving. This is her when she was thirteen, and i was only three. (My mom is mailing me a picture of us together when we were this young. The second i get it i will scan it for you to see.)

My earliest memory of her is the day she took me out to a picnic in our back yard. It was sort of like playing house, which wasn't a big deal for a five-year-old, but i remember feeling like an adult at the time. She let me prepare my own food and pack it up "nicely," as she always says. It must have been cold cheese on bread, since that's the only thing I ate when I was young. Then we took it out next to our creek, in the sunshine, and ate it. i haven't felt like an adult since.

This is Kirstie's college graduation ceremony. She went to Cottey Junior College in Nevada, Missouri (a two-year college) on a full scholarship and got a 4.0. Then she landed a nice job in Missouri as a lab assistant.

That's her ex-husband, Bill Jacobson. He was a cool guy as far as i was concerned, but my parents didn't think so and neither did she after living with him for a few years. He was a construction worker who was working at Cottey when she went there. They met one day when he was working on her apartment, and he somehow got her phone number. She had never been successful with men in high school, and neither had he, so they fit well together.

"We fell madly in love," she recently revealed. "At least, that's what we thought. We were living together within the week." They got married a few weeks after the above picture was taken, right before she turned twenty. She divorced him before she turned twenty-four. She says she has no regrets, and that Bill Jacobson recently found someone else to satisfy his "non-existant sex drive."

After the divorce Kirstie realized that she had no friends in Missouri and to my bliss moved back to Rochester. She lived with my family for a few months, and those few months were wonderful. She had all these amazing friends that would visit all the time, and even though i am ten years younger then her, she let me hang out with her crowd. You have to understand what it's like to be a little nerdy kid surrounded by cool adults that accept you.

i didn't make many friends in junior high when i was fourteen. i was too interested in twenty-four year olds to care about some little nutsacks.

But i digress. Kirstie didn't last long in the Durand household; she got all antsy with life and began to move around to all these different cities and states, and eventually countries. We didn't hear much from her. She visited places like Egypt, Ireland, Jerusalem, and India, mostly on free rides with the big shot businessmen boyfriend types. She learned many languages and studied many cultures. i guess that she was searching for direction. "Something was missing in my life. Something that was a part of me, that I didn't understand and therefore couldn't see. I looked for it wherever I went. It was frustrating, Adam, to live my life day to day without knowing myself. So I buried myself in the minds and lives of other people, places, and cultures."

This is Kirstie now. She's blossomed into a beautiful, open-minded working girl. She currently has a job managing a quality control and efficiency center in Henrietta, just a short walk from RIT where I am "schooling" as she says. Of course, the rest of her story (and there will be a lot more) will be written when it happens.

Oh, and Kirstie did find out what was missing in her life.