Every morning at 9 AM, a girl walks by our house.
I say girl but she is probably more appropriately described as a woman. I guess I say girl because I still feel like a girl. I still feel 15. Maybe 5?
Anyway, I imagine this girl-woman is laid back enough to wear her womanhood like a t-shirt rather than a red dress and if you were to ask her about it, she’d look down sort of surprised and say, “Yeah. I guess I am,” the same way I might respond to, oh, say, wearing my time-softened drill team t-shirt from high school. Some things you wear so comfortably, you forget them altogether until someone points them out.
To me, she looks like an Emma or Emily; something classic without a lot of frills. Yes, let’s call her Emma. Em for short. Anyway, Em walks behind a very large dog…
Oscar?
Sam?
No. Lucy.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Sometimes Em and Lucy stop in the front yard so Lucy can stick her snout in the hostas around the mailbox. Em takes this time to adjust her headphones and push her $5 sunglasses higher on her nose. She wears a baggy white t-shirt and cropped leggings with a black and white, woven chevron messenger bag across her chest. Her hair is piled on top of her head in an artful messy bun; the sort that would take me thirty minutes and half a can Aqua Net to imitate poorly.
I imagine that Em is very creative but also decisive. She is, after all, dressed and walking the dog before 9 AM. I assume that she is a graphic artist of some sort. She designs ads by day but really, she’d like to design cover art for her favorite bands.
I stand at the window with Eli on my hip, sipping my coffee, humming “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” wondering…
How do you make friends at 30?
40?
57 1/2?
How is Ada, my four-year-old with the old soul, making friends in her preschool class at this very moment?
It’s such a funny thing to attempt friendship with a stranger, isn’t it? And in a subdivision the size of ours, I wonder how many women like me are standing at their windows thinking I’ll say hello tomorrow.
Anyway, if you stop by this little blog or in the front yard while your dog sniffs the hostas, I do hope you’ll say hello. I will count you a friend and feed you whatever I can find in the fridge and we’ll toast to many adventures with wine or coffee or almond milk if you so fancy. Then we’ll probably spray paint something because, well, why not?
And there would be storytelling because I love, love, love a good story. Don’t you?
Speaking of stories, thanks for sending me your photos celebrating the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary! You can email me your photos all week long at ourstoriedhome(at)gmail(dot)com, upload them to Facebook or use #ourstoriedhome on Instagram. We want to see what you ate, made, laughed about, cried about, lived for: The goal is to document all of the wonderful stories our walls would tell about if they could talk!
Here’s a few of my favorites moments (both from our home and reader-submitted) from this week:
What stories do you have to tell this week, friend?
One Response
Really liked this post, and really like your blog! I can tell you it is VERY hard to make friends as you get older. It’s even hard to keep the ones you have. I’m trying to learn to appreciate the longtime friends in my life, and be thankful for the friends I make, sometimes just ‘in passing’. I certainly feel I have a lot of those through EBTH!