ran back to that hollow again

it was a cold morning. nice to see the cozy silvers in their cozy home, first thing. blueberry bagels and good company are warming to the soul, even if reading Isaiah is alternately warming and horrifying.

speaking of which, katie sent me this, which is just the right blend of warming and horrifying.

last nite i got to go to the gym at the same time as stacie. that's always fun. we get to sit next to each other on the weight machines and make really dramatic heave-ho noises/faces while she lifts like 40 lbs and i lift 20. also, normally when i'm on the treadmill, i'm just thinking about important life things like, i wonder if anyone can hear this cat stevens and/or journey song blaring through my headphones? but when stacie's running a couple of treadmills down, i get to add variety to my thought life by contemplating, i wonder if i could throw a handful of water and hit her without getting the machine between us all wet? (the answer, by the way is: Yes, If I Had A Better Throwing Arm.)

i don't know if i can get away with starting yet another paragraph without a segue, but i'll try. friday nite we moved! kind of unexpectedly. well, the move wasn't unexpected, but the timing was. we were planning to move saturday (we had to be out monday), but when we looked at the weather forecast on friday, it was calling for snow all day saturday. that didn't sound very good, so with katie's help i sent shouts out to all of our friends in this town, asking if anyone would like to help us move house after work, on icy sidewalks. through a strange series of miracles, about fifteen people showed up, throughout the course of the evening. katie (and her felt owl hat) and stacie and natalie all particularly went above and beyond the call of everyday friendship, but everyone was dropping something they had planned to be doing (and in some cases shuffling around friends or children or in-laws in order to free up their schedule), and everyone was lifting more than i was, and everyone was incredibly lovely and gracious the entire time.

so a move which began with tiffany coming to my work to jump the battery on my truck, and went through frenzied hours of moving, and sorting through a storage unit that was mostly full of junk, and two trips to the landfill in the snow, and cleaning a house, and sawing up a fake elevator.... was really much more of an adrenalin rush than the genuine pain that it should have been. i'm a little emotionally strung-out now, just from doing so much and processing so much in such a short amount of time, but the overall feeling that i had from the weekend was one of intense gratefulness. i have the most wonderful friends - and that is a true story that you can tell your children.

on friday nite, in all the bustle and the packing-up-of-last-minute-things, and katie leaving work early to shovel the walk and put down drop cloths at my new house, and stacie sitting in the back of phil's truck to protect my fake elevator from any damages, and natalie and amber helping me put away the rest of the kitchen and my bedroom, and worrying about everyone slipping even though no one ever does but me, and levi and brittany coming and squeezing some help in before a family dinner, and phil promising to carry my grandfather's typewriter in the cab of the truck so it wouldn't get hurt, and all of the people who kept apologizing for being late or having to leave before we were finished, as if there is a universe in which everyone is expected to show up and help someone else move for hours on a friday nite with just a few hours warning... my heart was very full of good things, and i knew it didn't have very much at all to do with my fancy new gingerbread house or big beautiful room or a door that locks. i got very melancholy, all of the sudden, right in the middle of packing up another box and carrying it out to natalie's car, because i realised that i will never have better friends than this, ever, for the rest of my life. i will never feel less alone than i do right now.

that's the good kind of melancholy, right, though? the kind that's worth it. the kind where something's so good, you just know that it has to end sometime.

but it's okay, because it will come back again after time is over.