excuses

Ha!  It’s raining.  There go my plans to do yardwork.  Whew.  Saved.

Anyway,  I’ve had a post about friends brewing (percolating?) for sometime now.  And by that I don’t mean it’s half written and saved as a draft, or even that it’s partially pulled together in my head somewhere.  I mean, I’ve been meaning to write a post about friends.

Recently – that is, the last couple months – I’ve seen a lot of some old friends.  Folks who I’ve known since, oh, the mid-1980’s.  Yes, we’re talking Old Skool here y’all.  You see, I’m still here in the town where I grew up and so I see people come and go and come and go ad infinitum.  It’s a small southern university town with big city pretensions and not a small amount of charm.  And I have space, here at the Starrhill Lesbian Bed and Breakfast Collective, for all visiting parties  So folks come back – for family visits, or whatever – and they stay with me.  And it’s the best.  AJ was just here, and some of the LA kids, and M the Back from Africa, and of course my Blue Rose Girl and the Hard Girl extendo-fam (who are on their way back!  woo!).  They come and they get clean sheets on the bed and a stack of towels (or a reminder that the towels are on the shelf above the mirror in the bathroom) and a key and off we all go.

And then there are the old friends who’ve stayed, or come back to stay – T, from Tuesday dinners, and the LB, natch, and others to whom I cannot link, but who y’all would *love*.  Love.  I swear.  They’re here, these old friends, folks from school and from the theater that I’ve known for my whole adult life and longer. (And the Secret Girls I can’t name here.)  They’ve formed what and who I am and I count back the years with them with pride.  Good old JG dropped me off from our trip to the market a few weeks ago and asked me if I knew how long we’d been meeting early Saturday mornings to buy produce and snark on whoever we saw – 15 years, he reminded me.  Fifteen years.  That’s the quality of folks I spend my days with, yes it is.  Teh Best, I tell you.

And then, somewhat out of the blue, other old friends show up.  The girl from elementary school whose daddy I ran into outside of the computer store and the two folks from middle school who both live here but who I rarely see.  And I *like* them.  They’re still the same old folks, after all this time.  Not in the sense of stagnant, but in the sense of here we are – living our lives as best we can.  I’d like to say it’s me, but, again, Teh Best, I say, these folks around me.

And the neighbors?  Let me sing their praises.  Kind and generous and watchful. Random gifts show up on my porch, because the woman across the street was thinking of me at a yardsale.  They throw my kittens back inside when they escape and and they bring me bags of apples from their trees for apple pie and loan me Havahart traps to catch stray cats.  They have me over for dinner and stop painting their kitchens to install my sump pump.  They win, yes they do.  I can hear them right now, in the post-afternoon-rain summer-porch way that we have in Starrhill.

And the Montessori people? Yes, them.  I’ve sung the praises of cho-girl, so you can just do your homework for that (but who knew she’d come with a whole extendo-fam of in-laws, too?), but there are others, too. The rest of them have joyously supported all my ttc efforts – with package delivery signing and general ass-covering for my million RE appointments.  That shit’s not in the job description.

And then there’s you.  All you internet people.  The ones I don’t “know”, but who speak, directly or indirectly, to me every fucking day.  Whose lives are inspirational – in that Making It way.  I know you because we’ve all tried to do something very hard – to make out our own map of how we want ourselves and our families to be. And I see you.  I see you making it every single fucking day.  Though the crap results from your bloodwork and the insurance bullshit.  Though breakups and stupid, stupid regulations that try to say how a family can be made.  Through poorly informed but well meaning RL friends and crazy internet drama.  Through your kids that make you nuts and your families that don’t realize the gems they have in you.  You pull though those things to make a map of a beautiful life and I see you.  I see you do things for each other that take my breath away – kindness and compassion and generosity to people who are nothing more than some HTML shot from one spot to another. I see you and I look to you for nothing more than hope.  Hope that is served up in spades every damn day.  For Example.  Note the double lines, yes, and then note well the number of motherfucking comments.  That’s what I’m talking about, y’all.  That’s the shit I’m talking about.