My sister has finished college and has been looking for work for the past few months now and has been a bit worried/depressed/despondent about it. Bad economy in general, our home state of Vermont is particularly thin on young people, where my parents live now is way too rural for her to have any fun, etc. For the past couple months I've been feeling vaguely sorry for her, but not enough to actually suggest that she do as I did and move to a city. Mainly because I fear (irrationally, now that I think of it, but anyways) that saying so could be read as an invitation to move in with me. Yeah, selfish of me.

But today she called me and she was practically hysterical. Crying because the dog wasn't acting normally (the dog, a rescued abandoned dog, is always a bit "neurotic", but is not the highest maintenance pet my family has had. He's not even in the top three) and she hadn't been able to get in touch with our parents, who are on vacation. She had left at least one and probably several messages and hadn't heard back from them for hours, she said. That's right, hours. Wow, horrifying. And apparently she insisted on getting a gun before they left to go on vacation, just for home defense. To be clear, this is the house she and I grew up in, two miles from the nearest paved road. As far as I know the last uninvited intrusion of any kind was a drunk asshole college student renting a house nearby, and that was before my sister was born. Other than bees and wasps (she's allergic) and the decrepit old farmbuildings our parents haven't taken down yet, I honestly can't imagine anything dangerous this time of year within sight of the house. Trees, I guess, if she climbs one and falls down... or some rusty wire... but she apparently bought a shotgun in case some random nut starts playing "The Most Dangerous Game" or a burglar just happens to hit our house.

Wow.

So now I feel even more obligated to encourage/help her move down here because I think she might literally be going crazy in rural Vermont while at the same time more leery of it because if she goes crazy anyway I do not want to be the one dealing with it.

Although now that I write this down, worrying about her moving in near or with me and us getting on each other's nerves is absurd (and, of course, like I said, selfish). Even if she thinks the way I assume she thinks, she wouldn't move to DC, she'd move to Boston. (Where she went to college, and we also have an aunt there.)