it's what you do

i have a friend named amanda. she and i were friends in high school. when she went away to college we tried to keep in touch, but in 1996 we spoke for the last time. it wasn't like we had a fight and we screamed and told one another we hated each other. on the contrary, i still adore her...and i hope the feeling is mutual.

imagine my surprise last friday evening when i got a phone call. it wasn't a number i recognized so i allowed it to go to voice mail. let's just say, i've since added the number to my phone. amanda, after 13 years. she was calling to say she was coming into town and even though she knew it was last minute and i might already be busy, she thought she'd call and say hello (the plane was getting ready to take off at this point so she said to call or text if i got the message). as soon as i hung up the phone from voice mail i typed in the text, "i have no plans, you are now my plans! call me when you land."

she had no definite idea where she was going to stay, nor how she would get there once she figured that out. she came here without much planning (hell, she'd bought her ticket that morning at 1:00 am) to help a friend. she called, i asked, she had no clue where, i told her i'd be there in twenty and she'd stay with us, at least the first night.

i warned her that josie would probably bark and be weird, as she often is when meeting new people. yeah, josie proved me wrong. she adored amanda, which honestly now that i think about it, doesn't surprise me at all. in fact, the next day while kev and i were at work, before she hooked up with her other friends, the two of them went on a walk. it made it that much easier to have company over later (it was the night of the fab dinner party) as josie wasn't all stressed because she had too much energy.

it was sweet and funny and not weird at all to be talking with this woman whom i'd last seen on her wedding day in 1996 (the wedding where kev and i had just started dating and her mother asked the two of us if wedding bells were in our future...). she is no longer married to him, but from the sounds of it, it is for the best.

we found out we are both doing the garden bed bottle border, although she is thinking she needs to drill holes in the bottom of the bottles so water doesn't collect and give the mosquitos down in texas a place to breed. i don't think that will be a problem, as the wells aren't all that big and as soon as the sun is out the water starts to evaporate.

anyway, after all those years we found we had grown in very similar ways.

beautiful, no?