[ed. note: i wrote this in the 5 minutes after the visit, so if you read the typo version, i blame my eagerness to capture and the limitations of my pink eeepc. i could only see the first half of each line as i typed.]
if i could have taken a video of the last 45 minutes without it being completely ridiculous and insulting, i would have. but that would have been impossible, since i had no warning my friend **** was gong to be stopping by. i never do. today i got her a cup of crushed ice, as usual, and then we started talking, and then she started crying, and we talked and talked and talked. about her life, how she isn’t used up, too old to try again, worth loving and knowing, and definitely someone that deserves respect. she is always tired, always sad, and always carrying too many bags. well, today i realized that she had never been out of our first floor, since we were talking about a painting of my uncle angus’ that she liked, and i told her we had two more upstairs. we begin walking….
she touched everything, peered in close in a particular *** style that i am used to, but the most mundane of our objects were treated with reverence: ari’s globe, the stair rail, the lights were all turned on to examine the quality of the light they produced. she managed to ask me the source of every item i had purchased at anthropologie and none from anywhere else. kinda skewed the view, but whatever. she saw the boys’ shower and got in, then (i forgot to mention this earlier, but she had switched to an english accent at this point) and exclaimed with great gusto that if she had a shower like ours, she would never get out. after standing on the front balcony (elaia’s room) and waving at a neighbor i don’t really now (she told me ‘i don’t know him, but whatever’ in british english), we went back in for a little lego examining, and then she told corin if she had showers like that she wouldn’t ever get out. corin very seriously told her that perhaps it was better she didn’t have showers like ours. she doesn’t like the gray primed pool, where’s the blue, she wonders why we have pulp fiction in our movie pile. she came out on the roof patio and we looked at all the plants, and then in the fourth bedroom and she [turned on the light and touched everything, telling me how much she liked it] and then pretended to sit down against the wall between the bed and window, pretended to read a book, then leaned over and waved out the window at imaginary people, saying something akin to ‘oh, how hard it must be for you down there. sorry, we’re up here… we’ll be right down. just up on the top floor…’
i was dying of laughter with her, and at the absurdity of having so much, and not being able to rewind her life to give her a bed in our family, and yet wanting her to believe that a clean, loving space with relationships that encourage and support can be hers. and i can hardly express how guilty/grateful/clueless i feel at the beauty of our home, family, friends and how little we appreciate it.
we talked about being reconciled to god, being his friend instead of his enemy (‘you, his enemy, no!’ ah, appearances can be very deceiving) and i hope that she can see through all this stuff to the one thing i have to give that won’t get old or out of date. what an unexpected gift of a visit.
theepic 
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