Last night I wasn't myself. I mean I was, just in a weird mood. I went and hung out with one of my best friends in the whole world. Julia Sattler. There are only a few calender months which her last name will be Sattler. Kelly will change that in March; or more technically I suppose they will change it together. It will change to Aita, which I always spell wrong and probably have again.
Julia has always lived minutes away from my former piano teacher and second mother Laurie Rivera. I'm glad her last name changed before I knew her. Too many people are changing their names on me lately. The Rivera's are a stable name in my life. And a stable place for me to go when my walls are collapsing. Since I felt them starting to lose stability, I called over there from my five minute drive away.
Laurie was tearing apart walls. Painting the living/dining room. Odd coincidence. My internal walls were crumbling and the walls of her home were also coming down. They moved into that house when I was eight I think. I might be wrong, but I don't think I am. (Was it 1989 Laurie?) I remember when she painted the first time and when she put up the staff. I think my mom helped with that once upon a Thursday. That was the day we used to go for lessons. Last night was a memory, one we made together. One that I'll never forget. I asked what I could do to help and had made it there "just in time" to help empty her china cabinet.
And so that's what we did. I got to hear all the stories. The humming bird mug that came from her now deceased uncle, her youngest son's namesake. The glasses she took from the restaurant she worked in when her eldest son was a small boy. (She used the word "stole." I can't imagine Laurie "stealing" anything so I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that part.) We finished getting everything out of the top part and she told me there was just the bottom to shelves and whatever was in the middle to do and that was it.The middle cabinet was home to her most treasured possessions. The pumpkin candles. She must have saved these things for years. I'm not sure how many there were. But a lot does a good measure of telling one who was not there to see it how many candles I found. I dug them from behind the place mats. I dug them from under each other. Some had been in there so long their color had faded completely.
All the while I was digging them out I heard her rational for keeping them. "I was going to put them in a pumpkin." she kept repeating it, as though saying it again and again would somehow justify saving years of half-used candles. By the end of it all, as I was sorting though the candles, piling them into "keep" and "toss," we were both laughing hysterically as she was telling Juan I was making fun of her - almost through tears. From laughing of course.
After admitting to me that she hadn't even had a pumpkin last year, she conceded to throwing away all the ones I had in the "toss" pile. She surprised me by even including in the trash bag a few I had designated as "questionable." After all, what does one need with pumpkin candles when one does not even have pumpkins?
Back in college, in 2004 when blogging was hardly even a thing yet, I was here. Blogging before blogging meant anything to anyone. You can look in the archives for my past writings, but it was much more like a journal in the past. When we started fundraising, I messed around with the idea of launching something new for this new phase of our journey but actually hated that idea. I am a sum of all of my life and so much of it is here already. So I'm keeping it here. At least for now.
My main focus these days is blogging about our newest journey into the bizarre and wonderful world of gestational surrogacy. Posts dated 2013 and forward will trend heavily toward that journey. I don't promise everything I write will be about though. There might be other things that sneak in occasionally.
Please come along our journey with us. As the saying goes, "The more, the merrier!"
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