Here

Not enough can be said about old friends. Connecting with people, people with whom you have connected before or still - both versions providing a panacea from all the newness that is sometimes life - life in the David Byrne "this is not my beautiful house" way that being a grown up is all about.

A weekend of friends - various friends from various times - all from impossibly long ago (since, when I paused to realize I have known the newest friend of either group... for ten years..) came after a smidge of social panic, a year of avoiding hosting anything....

The weekend served to 'get my head right.' I feel alive and grown up and grateful and relieved to be the person I am with the experiences I have had in the place where I am right now - with a rich melange of friends. Fun, funny, interesting, compassionate, good people who didn't care that the cobwebs were still on the porch.

(I noticed them at Saturday's cook out. Then noticed them again at Sunday's. It's Monday night. Along with the folding chairs thrown out to seat folks on the cooler side of the house... they are there still.)

I like my littles to see us with other bigs, and I like to see them scrambling with other kids, both known and not - their own age and not, in and out of the house, toys strewn and loud noises up and down the street. I like nerf gun battles and scooter races, sidewalk chalk and competitive kick-the-can.

I like to imagine, when they see us laughing aloud with people they don't really know, that they are baffled a little by the 'real' us, by the normalcy we must've projected once - before we yelled and maintained and instructed (and, sometimes, ignored). Before we were -gasp - Parents.

After the weekend of magical guests, I got up my littles all went to day camp to give me two weeks of working peace. That seemed a small miracle in itself. A quiet house, and a to do list that got... done.

The house is clean again, and I am starting my own scramble, some - to put the rest of the summer into place, and to figure out how to get more adults in my world. So I can remember who I am - which seems to leave a whole lot more of me for my Littles.