Dearest Nadine,

I think the first birthday I spent with you was your 25th, when you were my relatively new friend and housemate in Lawrence. I recall that we clicked instantly and I soon came to feel you were like the younger sister I never had. We were emotionally intimate, we joked around a lot, and even engaged in the low-stakes minor squabbling that characterizes so many sibling relationships. I always looked forward to your company at the end of the day, when we would cook, chat, and share good food and cheap wine with our grad school friends. Many of those friends were from Germany, and your efforts to teach me about your homeland’s culture — and particularly your patience in helping me with a difficult language — have shaped my life ever since.

After grad school, we went our separate ways, but nonetheless managed to see each other with remarkable frequency over the next two decades. I’ve lost count of the number of times you and Annika welcomed me in Tübingen, that picture-perfect university town. Similarly, I must have slept on your and Jens’s couch in Stuttgart at least half a dozen times. You visited me in Hamburg and came to Vermont at the end of a particularly cold winter; I remember we tried to go for a walk in the field outside my house and ended up scurrying back after five minutes, defeated by a brutally cold northwesterly blowing straight down from the Arctic. You visited Kieko and me in Munich in the winter of 2013 and in Lons-le-Saunier in the summer of 2015, where we went for a long paddle down the L’Ain (probably a little too long).

You have had happier birthdays than this one, and I’m glad to have shared some of them with you. I’m sure you neither want nor expect me to be lachrymose; you’d rather I try to make you laugh, which was never difficult and always rewarding, especially when you’d laugh so hard that you couldn’t exhale anymore. I think that’s one of the reasons we clicked: your easy and joyous laughter and my compulsive need to be the joker and the clown were a perfect match. I hope the memory of those moments still makes you smile. Those times with you have been some of the most joyful of my life. I never had a little sister, but through your friendship, I know what it must feel like to have one.

Peace, laughter, and love.

Frank