Yesterday

Yesterday was full of love. It was my bud and I heading down the shore and getting to Lunenburg just in time for the ceremony at the cenotaph. It was a town that certainly understands history and appreciates it. It was faces young and old looking on as old hands lay wreaths, young hands played bagpipes. and small children wondered what was up. We had our two minutes of silence - such a short time to be silent for those who cannot be anything but - and at the end a huge elm tree shivered and lost its remaining leaves. They swirled down as the bagpipes skirling rose. Then the crowd dispersed, many of them ending up in the same cafe as K. and I. We found our way to our favourite paper store and the owner was futsing with outside planters full of frost stricken plants. She assured us she was opening and we spent a very happy hour in the land of Japanese papers, stamp sets, ink and other ephemera. Then it was lunch at the Tin Fish and the slow wander back on the old road with a stop or two in Mahone Bay.
I dropped K. off and went off to a very special Babe's dinner in town. There are six of us Babes and we try to meet as often as we can to sort out our lives and get that connection we so desire. We've been doing this for about twenty years - through all the major and minor life changes available to the living. We have between us nine birth children, five or six step or near step children, three grandchildren (all mine - I'm the eldest), several husbands, near husbands and ex-husbands, and so on. When we get together, we insist on things like great but simple food, drink for those who do, bubbly water for those who don't, perhaps a puff on the deck for those of us with habits and LOTS of talk. We might laugh a lot (we do) we certainly have cried buckets but mainly we are our complete and gorgeous flawed selves with each other. And as any spiritual, philosophical or psychological teacher will tell you - this is the gold! Nothing will replace it. Now, why was this a more significant one? Just because one of our Babes has been living in Ontario for the last six months, taking care of a sick parent, and makes it home sporadically. And we need her and she needs us.
So my novel was left on the back burner but my stroke bucket (as we transactional analysts say) is full and I'm ready to write.

what a fantastic week I've had. I finished my novel's second draft last Saturday just in time to go out to the airport to pickup a friend of mine and her husband. I had not seen this friend in 28 years. We spent two years in each other's pocket and when we saw each other we were right back at it. It was heaven. I have to get into work today - clients! Imagine! But the thrill of hanging out with K. lingers on. We walked and talked and drank way too much wine and remembered countless stories of our time together. Ron was a prince who cooked and drove us about and didn't roll his eyes too much at our endless stories and gales of laughter and tears. K's husband is a wonderful man - sweet and sharp both and I adore how good he has been to her. We realized that we will never run out of affection for each other or stories. I am writing a novel inspired by our time in Zed. I can't tell her story because it isn't mine to tell but she has blessed the notion of a book about two young women who would do almost anything to make their time in a torturous logging town more rewarding.

Today is the Day!

this day

on this day the daylilies are extremely excited

they love every day

but this is a very big day in the daylily world.

I can tell by the way they toss their heads

like sexually charged up thirteen year old girls

when the basketball team strolls the halls.

this is the day

that all the plot tangles fell out leaving

a perfectly clear narrative line

instead of the bottom of the fishing tackle box

that I'd been looking at for too long.

this is the day

that my dearest guy says sure

I'll do the shopping and why don't I sweep up before I go

and my step-son goes with him

wanting to be away from

mercurial mood I'm sure.

this is the day

my long-lost friend arrives

and the sheets for her bed are drying on

a most perfect drying day

and towels are plumped up on the dresser

and flowers are put in a wavy green glass

on the bedside table.

this is that day!

one more meal

C tells us that after a year

they've looked in her head and

"there's nothing there!"

we knew that.

Circus girl is reminded of the long green rubber hand we called 'Garou' -

shaken in her face to make her scream with laughter - its long red tipped nails always reminding me of mom

and I steal a few minutes to scratch the black rabbit's head - soft and boney

I am down on my knees in J's hall to do this

I am down on my knees begging, surrendering, beseeching the moon, the gods, the Buddha, the black rabbit perhaps

to please oh pleeeeeeeeeeease let us have one more meal together

one more

and we eat... hen's bounty and salads - fruit and not, Mo leaves the sausages heating in the oven until we are all quite done but we manage them

She has listened to J's desire for NO bacon - so smelly and invasive.

I pretend to care but I don't

'god this Tibetan hot sauce is gooood.'

And D. get's underwears all the way from Florida.

I just want to have one more dream heard from

one more story of yesterday today or tomorrow

one more photograph around the table

one more meal chant - hurry hurry - stop serving, stop doing dishes - stop stop and chant

J will be in Mexico, D's ex and kids will be there.

M is leaving with Dunc for Paris so I won't see her again

And I could scream because I'm not remotely ready for this to be over.

And Mo catches me talking to the rabbit again

Let's go for lunch to your favourite person 'what's her name?'

And I, fragile with leftover killer flu,

and pondering the luminousness of this devine emptiness

say sure. I'd like that.

Friends

All my life I have been rich.

I have waded in still pools, lolled on pillow-strewn couches, talked til the moon rose high and set again, dreamed out loud, laughed til I cried and cried til I laughed with my generous, brilliant, kind, honest and funny women friends.

It all started with having a built-in pal - who moved when I moved (which was every 2 or 3 years) went to school with me, suffered whatever we suffered as adolescents and remains one of my favourite women - my dear sister Jude.

I have a vast network of women friends that seems to only increase as I age. I have my closest pals that I phone daily and meet up with often. I am lucky to have friends that I share work with and so get to hang out with them in a variety of ways. I have friends that I write with, make plays with, teach with, walk dogs with, and travel with. The consistent factors have been that we like to cook and eat together, that we will never never run out of stories to tell each other, that we share a peculiar and wry sense of the world, that we like to share books, experiences, recipes, stories but not our men or for the most part our living arrangements - (although I am still very close to a couple of women I shared a home with).

When I started this post I was listing and telling all about my friends and so my dear readers (all of whom happen I believe to fall into this category of women friends) - it got too much. Who would I put where? All are golden - all precious and all hold slightly different places in my life.

Why am I even thinking of this? Because this morning I got an email from a friend who I only saw in my entire life for two years - thirty years ago. After a long period of silence we have in the past four years taken up correspondence - and it is has been scary and heavenly and bittersweet to do so. . Our time together was incredibly intense - it was definitely love at first sight and we lived in a very difficult time and space. To me - she was daring, provocative, generous, beyond hilarious and WILLING! Willing to take on logging companies, boredom, prejudice, juggling, husbands, dynamite and tequila hangovers. We were clowns together, loggers, newspaper editors and imaginers of a better funner world. And here is where I failed our friendship. I let her go to save myself. I left town and didn't look back. Sure I didn't know. I didn't know what her life would become (what it probably already was) and I didn't know that I might have helped pull her out of where we were. I didn't think I could presume upon our friendship to ask her to come along and she didn't think she could presume to be included. I just knew I had to leave. That is unspeakably dramatic and stupid to even write but it is true. And now she writes me to tell me that a family reunion will place her in my part of the world and could we connect? Like finding a jewel that I let carelessly fall from its setting and fall into a crack in the floor she appears. I am rich.