memorabilia

I spent most of today shuffling things from one box to another, and soon I'll start doing the same thing with my luggage. I'm asking myself why I decided to uproot myself in a fairly profound way at this time in my life, and the answers keep coming back as the questions that started me along this road in the first place. Always those questions. How can I learn to love them? I mean, do I have to? Is it like eating beans? Right now I'm getting sent to bed for refusing, but I'll appreciate them when I'm older?

I'm sorting through stuff now - heavy stuff in my head and heart, and comfortingly solid things in the form of papers and cards and letters. Remember when people used to write letters? I have proof: A note from my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Meriwether; a couple typed pages from a girl named Lauren (not you, Breakin'-the-Law) who I don't remember anymore; and Kristin - where are you, Kristin? - the correspondance of a long friendship stretched between New Jersey and Texas.

The stretching keeps happening - along with the questions. Sometimes I worry that it's like pulling taffy, which can grow longer and longer the further apart you pull, but gets thin in the middle. But friendships and connections are more complicated than taffy, right? More tasty, too. We want or need or seek each other for different reasons at different times. We loop around each other and lob our questions and answers back and forth, and sometimes we make sense to each other, and other times not. But when I look for the threads in my life, it's my friends who help me track them.

On Friday I leave for a summer in Washington State - beautiful Whidbey Island - and I pray that with all the stretching of this year, we stay tougher than taffy; and that the questions are a game we can learn to love because it connects us to each other; and that, if nothing else, we all come to appreciate our beans.