Learning how to be friends

Helping each other

Elisa and Nicole got me thinking about friendship today.

About the work of deepening into friendship.  The time it takes to really know another person.  The challenging of really ever getting to know another person.

It seems that we speak the same language, doesn’t it? Yet, so often we don’t speak the same language.  A word that means something to you means something different to me.  Our beliefs are different.  We can each be using totally different words and concepts to express the same thing.  Or maybe we’re using similar words and concepts but we’re light years apart in understanding.

What births a friendship?  Two people seem to like one another.  There’s a spark, a similarity  perhaps a recognition.  The two feel intrigued.  They want to learn more.

Dust bunnies begone, gasping over curry soup & a wildlife announcement.

Back when our Book Club once went snowshoeing…

Last night I hosted Book Club at our house.

(One only need do this once a year.  Our little club meets every other month and there are about ten women, max, so one need only clean dust bunnies every year, unless someone else comes to visit in-between.  Remember when Ms. Heather and Mr. Tony came to visit last month?  Dust bunnies were cleaned then.  However, as a book club member pointed out:  it gets dark here  in the Northwoods early.  No one can see dust bunnies anyway!  A quick dust, vacuum, la de da, and pour the wine for the gals!  No one looks around twice with appraising eyebrows.)

I served (ha ha, the poor things didn’t know) Detox food!  They ate curried sweet potato soup and broccoli-garbanzo salad except I didn’t have broccoli and substituted Napa cabbage instead.

Unfortunately, the first book club member who tasted the soup yelped. I kid not.  She gasped, “What is in this?” “Curry,” I replied patiently.  ”I can’t eat anything this hot!” she panted.  I dutifully gave her water.  The other eight members of book club seemed to like it.  Darn, why can’t we ever have a consensus about anything?

When Death unexpectedly asks for the last dance…

Sunrise, sunset…

How unexpectedly Death can knock on one’s door and steal away a loved one, a friend, a co-worker.

One minute you can be talking and laughing and joking and making fun of what’s right and not right in the world…and suddenly you’re not right in the world.  You’re gone.  You’ve fallen over at your desk, fifteen minutes passed out before someone finds you and hurries to breathe into your mouth, breathe once, breathe again, please breathe, please don’t die, please move, please laugh again…

As some of you know from my Facebook status–or calls, or email on that sad yesterday afternoon–Barry’s 47-year-old co-worker and friend at the Sentinel, Cathy, died somewhere between 2 and 3 p.m. from massive cardiac arrest at her desk.

Barry and she had laughed together yesterday morning, and planned and plotted, and shared as co-workers often do all during the beautiful bright February morning here in the Upper Peninsula.

A non-apologetic manifesto about being weird.

Weird? Not weird?

First, let’s get the definition straight.  If a person is weird, what the heck does that mean?

A Google search revealed these synonyms:  strange – odd – peculiar – quaint – uncanny – bizarre.

Now that we *almost* know the definition of weird, let’s explore this phenomenon further.

May I suggest that those who are not labeled weird by society do the following thing very well:  they fit in.  They eat the same as their peers, dress in the same clothes, act in appropriate ways, speak without being *too* strange or offensive, are friendly, polite and well-behaved, or at least act acceptably bitchy, raunchy and amusing.  They act “normal”.

Ms. Heather and Mr. Tony come to supper

Remember Ms. Heather?

Last night Ms. Heather and her husband, Mr. Tony, came for supper.  They arrived in our snowy woods around 5:10 p.m. (Heather, as some of you may recall, is a blogging friend who lives down in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan.  We enjoyed breakfast together in Grayling last June when I motored down south to visit my family in the Thumb.  Her blog tells of “Our Adventures Up North” and features lovely photography. )

Gosh, did we enjoy our almost-three hours with these folks.  Because my memory can be–how shall we say this?–less than accurate, I didn’t tell Barry anything about Ms. Heather except to show him photos on her blog and sketch in some broad facts.  So he got to ask them all sorts of questions about themselves and I took notes this time.  (I had a big notebook stashed under the table and scribbled notes…nah…you guys really mustn’t take literally half of what you read here, truly, because the Imagination sometimes likes to add details of what might have happened.)

Thank you for four wonderful years of blogging here.

The very first photo I published. Our house creatively shining in the woods.

Yep, my friends, it’s been four years of blogging on WordPress come Winter Solstice.

Will you forgive me a post down Memory’s Lane?

My first WordPress blog started after lighting a grand solstice fire on a snowy night out in the woods on December 21, 2008.  A daily blog called Opening the door, walking outside followed for an entire year.  After less than a ten-day break, Lake Superior Spirit opened its blogging doors on January 1, 2010.

The double life I’ve been living lately

I suppose you’ve heard the rumors.

That I’ve been living a double life.

On the one hand Kathy sits here in the woods practicing Presence and meditating and watching the snow melt during our latest warm spell.

On the other hand Kathy is–are you ready for this?–in Nova Scotia.

I kid you not.  (Read on.  You can determine for yourself how much of this is “real” and how much is blogging tomfoolery.)

On November 13th, just as your blogger prepared to take a blogging break, one of her blogging friends sent an email.  Sybil and Amy-Lynn and Lynne were preparing for a hike, exploring the woods of Nova Scotia.

Note the Great Lakes. Note Nova Scotia.

Would I like to join them?

Our annual Christmas fight

Every Christmas season it’s the same.  The hard-scrabbling fight for presents, the intense gleam in greedy eyes as we steal the gaily wrapped packages, the glint of green and red holiday lights on the dice as they clatter against metal.

Lights dim low in Nancy’s living room as we eight women sit cross-legged on the floor, like children, except for one of us who leans low from her chair to throw the dice.

We’re looking for sixes or ones to land face up.  If we throw the magic numbers, we get to choose a package.  We already know what lies wrapped beneath the gold and green paper, inside that elf stocking, under those dangling bright purple balls.  We know books lie within the package, for we’re at Book Club, our annual Christmas book exchange.

Tis the season…

When people die on Facebook

Death

Yesterday morning I woke up to discover the death of a Facebook friend.

We’ve been watching her die slowly on Facebook for the past several weeks.

She actually friended me about a month ago.  She was the daughter of my children’s babysitter when they were mere babes.  For a very short stint, we once worked together.

About five or ten years ago we had a significant encounter, one of those encounters of which I’ve lost all the particulars.  I know I had a dream about her.  We ran into one another outside the sauna of a local motel.  I shared the dream with her–not one detail can be recalled all these years later–and we bonded deeply for maybe twenty minutes.

Maybe I also shared the dream I had of her mother, our babysitter, before she died.  I dreamed of a Native American blanket wrapped around her basement.  A few weeks later she was unexpectedly dead.

I don’t recall what we talked about outside the sauna, but we talked, and we hugged and laughed and maybe cried, and then five years pass in the blink of an eyelash and she friended me on Facebook.

Can I come over to your house?

Best friends

A sweet thing happened recently in my blogging world.

My childhood best friend, Carol, suddenly appeared with a comment on my Neil Armstrong tribute post!  What do you know!

(The tribute talked about Carol and me sleeping out in my parent’s backyard apple orchard in 1969.  We looked up at the moon in amazement trying to imagine man walking up there on that mysterious white orb.)

Friends

Carol and I grew up together.  She lived one street over and it only took three minutes if you ran through our neighbor’s back yard.  We were both so shy.  Afraid to talk in school, scared of our own shadows sometimes.

Big 6th grade boys pointed paper guns at us as we walked to kindergarten and we ran all the way back home, petrified of imminent death.