MommaK and I were a sassy duo back in the eighties. Obviously. While she’s off making her dream house come true, I am sneaking in here to share a thought about the woman you love and who is my cousin and who I can’t wait to see in November and who is above everything, my friend. Below is a post I wrote about her last year moments before my first son was born. And here I am now moments before my second son. Much has changed and also not changed in these sixteen months. And I only wish I could be there with her to be some sort of help although I’m mostly a beached mother of late. I know this because I saw some video footage of myself lying on the couch and I make a good whale is all I’m saying. A good beached whale. So while MommaK is off directing sweaty men carrying heavy boxes, I am here washed up and waiting for tell of the move. Or another cookie and massage.

My family moved around so much that my brother and I don’t believe we have the same hometown. He says he’s from Pennsylvania. I say I’m from New Hampshire. I suppose we’re both right. It’s up to us to decide which address became a home and saw us through those hormone-ridden formative years. There are a million ways, all of which I will spare you, in which I am grateful for all the moving. I do wonder what it’s like to have grown up in one place and how that influences who you are and how you see the world and yourself in the world. As hard as I wonder, I shall not know.

I do know that moving around means not knowing the same people for any great span of time. I have managed to keep a handful of friends here and there from the various addresses of my youth. I take comfort in knowing those people who have known me along this road. Somehow it proves that I have existed elsewhere. Perhaps when you grow up in the same place you get to feel that sense of who you were every time you go back to your hometown. That’s what I imagine anyway. For me, I find that sense of homecoming in the people I have known.

My cousin is the one and only contemporary I have known for my entire life. She’s the girl I grew up next to through phone calls and yearly visits. She’s the girl I could hardly wait to see and would fight with and be jealous of within hours. Now as adults we’ve forged out a new good thing, a relationship fit for the adults we managed to become despite our best efforts. Or mine anyway, she’s been an adult far longer than I have.

She and her girls traveled up here to visit and left yesterday after a grand old time. As her girls swam and then later gawked at the circus acts, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t still the two of us in their shoes flanked by Bebob and other assorted aunts and uncles. We done grown up and I have known her every step of the way. There’s no one else in the world I can say that about. Not one.

Meredith

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