The Inbetween Time

I am living in that inbetween time right now. Christmas is over. New Year's is over. School hasn't started back yet. Everyone is hanging out at home. We need to take the Christmas decorations down. We need to clean house. We need to reorganize. I really don't think that all of this will be done until everyone goes back to their normal lives.

Christmas was wonderful. So good to be with all my children and Ava. Ava is so precious...sweet, easy-going, beautiful, full of life and so very entertaining. Her favorite words right now are uh-oh. So fun.
Time at my mom's house was relaxing and fattening. She made us a amazing breakfast and dinner every day. Seeing my brother, Jeff, and his family was fun. Thanks, Paige, for decorating the tree with dinosaurs.
Getting to spend one day with Ann and her kids, Sue and Dennis, Laurel and her kids, and Peggy, Evelyn and Emily was the perfect ending to a great trip.

I just finished reading a book, The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls. I bought it in the airport after my flight was cancelled and I knew I was going to be trying to fly on standby. Great book. I wish that my old book club in Maryland had read it and discussed it. I am sure that Elizabeth would have made some of the same comments that she made about the mother in Angela's Ashes. This book is the American version of Angela's Ashes. There are parts of this book that are heartbreakingly sad but there is so much truth and honesty in this book that it is worth the sadness.

I just started reading a book that was given to me by sweet Katie and already there is something in this book that I want to share with you. The book is titled Into The Tangle of Friendship and is written by Beth Kephart.

"In the theater of family hang the scintillas of friends. I learned young that all families are porous, osmotic, forever redefined and shifted by the friends we bring home, the stories they tell, the residues and mysteries they leave behind. Kelly was my friend, but she was also, indisputably, part of my family-part of the questions my mother, father, brother, sister asked, part of the plans we made, part of our compromising, our negotiating, our blood work, part of our dinner table, our laughter, our encouragement, our praise. Denise, too, was a link in the family chain: we all knew and embraced her, we all were changed by having known her; she was fixed in family memory and lore long after the friendship was over.
My mother's friends were so woven into the rest of us that we gave them family names: Aunt Carol, Aunt Loretta, Aunt Joan. Our house was their house, and their homes were ours, and I was eager, always, to see them, to impart my latest adventure, to find out about theirs. My family would leave town for a while and then come trundling back, and my mother's friends were always there, a circle of safety, a beguiling continuance. I knew their birthdays and sighs, I knew their laughter, their favorite candies, I knew enough about them to imagine both halves of the phone talk I'd hear my mother having when I'd slip, like a secret, into the stairwell at night. At nine, I believed my life would replicate my mother's, that I would collect, like living prayers and trophies, these steadfast familial souls whom my children would call Aunt and whose homes would be mine and whom I could love with unawavering abandon.
But for me, at least, such a feat would not come easily. For me, the desire for endless friendship far outweighed my apparent talent for it."

I believe that I have collected my own living prayers and trophies.
In childhood I was slightly afraid of the friends I accumulated.
In high school I made many friends but only one during that uncertain school experience that I would have called a lasting friend...Mary Shubatt...freckled and sweet...she was precise and organized and she loved my quirkiness and cherished my silliness...and she knew that when you went around the corner in my dad's car and you were in the passenger seat that you had to hang onto the door or it would fly open..and you better have your seatbelt on.
Camp WaMaVa provided many amazing friendships for me. I can't even begin to name them...for fear that I would leave someone out.
College gave me some forever friends...roommates and soulmates.
But it is those friend that have helped me raise my children that I feel such a strong kinship with...Pixie McCall, my friend since I was 11 and more like a big sister than a friend...Jane Edson, she allowed me to relax....Donna Hanner, so kind and warm and hospitable....Adie Johnson, my next door neighbor who became my sister....Tammy Selby, so much time together at camp with our little children and pondering life and parenting....Ann Evankovich, my now friend who allows me to be myself and allows to talk about everything without condemnation or criticism.
I don't know where I would be without these living prayers and trophies in my life.

Tell me about your living prayers and trophies.