washwords

Before noon today, I received surprise news concealed in a routine email – an acquaintance is engaged … and expecting!

I shouldn’t have been surprised. It capped an already happy morning. I came in early and was done what I thought would take all morning before nine, and then found a meeting canceled – happy day indeed, which, in turn, laced and tied a wonderful weekend. More than happy, it was a weekend, no a time, of love.

Saturday morning ML and I brunched with an old friend. I was blessed to grow up with “family friends” – I was probably 20 or so before I realized not everyone had this. But we did. And this friend – J – almost exactly a year younger than me has been my friend pretty literally from (her) birth. We shared a crib and a childhood at the therapeutic camp our parents ran that integrated “typical” kids and those with emotional disturbances or developmental disabilities (yessss, it was the 70s), holidays and playgrounds.  She and her family are more than friend, sometimes more than family. We spent weekends in a multi-family cabin in the Adirondacks, touring Williamsburg one year, at their community pool, after they moved to Virginia, a lifetime away then, when I was a kid.

Her dad’s calm, steady, soothing eulogy is one of the few concrete moments I can recall from my dad’s funeral when I was twelve, their support instrumental beyond measure in helping us all move beyond that day and breathe again.

J and I are both “sensitive” people, something that as anyone who has been there knows is not easy in teendom and young adult, especially.   We both had our rocky roads to hoe, over different issues and similar ones. Sensitivity has its good points- we’re creative sorts, writers, empathic, which has made it always easy to connect.

J and I are in touch and then out of touch for way too long in ways that are pretty universally my fault. The reconnections are instant: she is my family, my friend, deep in my soul, intersecting over shared laughs and pangs.

J was there at my first wedding, listening to my anxieties in my suite getting dressed, my fussing over pearls and pictures and protocols, never once even hinting that any of it were ridiculous, though some of it was.

She was there when that ended, coming to visit, staying with me, sharing her road, her struggles plainly and with compassion, and in so doing, allowing me to share lowness and fears I hid from most everyone else then.

Saturday over Mimosas at Annie’s in my old 17th Street hood, I met J’s girlfriend, and now… her fiancee, a lovely woman who radiated warmth and humor and love for my beautiful friend. I saw my friend joyful and at peace and happy, truly happy. I looked across the table at ML, cracking jokes, coming alive as he does when meeting people though he would claim to be shy.

For a moment, even if just for that moment, even if there are grumblings and work deadlines and rain and way-too-cold springtimes, there was love, pure and simple, and nothing else in my world. It was sparkly and it was right. It was love.

love, friend, wedding, happiness, light, news, family, old friend, sensitive,