It’s 3am, well almost 3:30 now, and I can’t sleep.

I have one of those almost migraines.  The one no amount of medicine helps, and it refuses to allow me sleep.

So, I am sitting at my kitchen table, in the dark, drinking vanilla almond tea, reading, thinking, sipping.

My husband’s out of town.  My oldest is at a birthday party/sleep over.  It’s so quiet right now, just the occasional low hum of the refrigerator and the tick tick ticking of my kitchen clock.

Darkness is my house’s pajamas.

I heard once when I was younger, a house reflects its owners.  Not in appearance necessarily, but in atmosphere, that the walls “absorb our psychic vibrations and emotions.”

Ok, I’m almost positive I heard it in conjunction with a good horror story, but I’m just gonna go with it.  The world would be so much more real if walls could talk.

I wonder what the walls in my house would say?  I imagine walls reporting in a truly unbiased fashion.  Well, maybe they’d report after the family left in an unbiased fashion.  While the family lived within the belly, the walls may just hold its tongue, or er drywall.  After all, a little fire, an overzealous hammer, heck a little ugly paint, and the wall’s my hostage.

Movin on.

When I was a kid and lived with my dad in the trailer court, I spent a lot of time with a friend named Angie.

Angie was one of the good kids, with good parents.  They lived in a nice little house just outside town on a couple acres.  She was the first kid I ever heard tell her mom and dad, “I love you.”

Truthfully, I think her parents felt sorry for me.  They sorta adopted me and I spent almost a whole summer at their house.  We rode the lawn mower, wore long girly night dresses, and ate Popsicles non-stop.  Sometimes we’d put a quilt in the back yard, and lay on it in our nightgowns all day.  Sucking on Popsicles, laying on our backs looking at the sky, making stories out of clouds.

Angie’s mom made me white rice.  I loved it with milk and sugar.  I ate so much of it, to this day her elderly mother says, “Tonya.  Had any good rice lately?”  Then laughs and laughs.

I’ve been back in Ohio for two years and still haven’t gone to see them.  Talked with them on the phone, in fact I owe Angie a call.  I thought when moving back here, once I put my house in order, I was going to hook up with my old pals.  The ones who maintained contact with me the last twenty five years. 

I haven’t.

Part of it is, living in the now is busy.  I don’t know if I have time to do an old friendship justice.  I tend to be an all or nothing kind of gal.  At least that’s what people tell me.  I won’t even take on a project if I don’t have adequate time to do it justice.

Looking up old friends, that’s a time consuming project.

Its only part that though.  Seeing old friends is emotionally, a lot of work.  I didn’t pick the circumstances of my childhood.  When I meet people now, unless I tell them, they never guess I was born white neglected trash.

It’s not something I hide, or am ashamed of.  I didn’t choose it.  And once I was old enough to choose another way of life, I did.  I dealt with all that baggage and put it to bed.  Its part of me, helped make me who and what I am, for better or worse.  But, it’s not all of me.  I worked very hard to lose the traits I considered trashy, heh.

But, people who knew me then, see me now, through the glasses of my past, which really isn’t a big deal unless they refuse to see who I am today.

I have looked up old friends over the years and almost every time am disappointed.  They are so glad to see me at first, then after we talk about our lives, catch up, well then not so much.

In almost every situation, they look at my life now and I see disbelief in their eyes.  Not that I have some uber unbelievable life..heh, you read my blog and know that ain’t true.  But, it’s almost like they are disappointed I’m not trash, not struggling, not drama.  Like maybe they wanted to see me because they believed of all their old friends, they were sure to be doing better in life than I am.

The resentment is subtle but almost always comes.

Maybe that’s why I don’t go see my oldest friends here.

Better to remember sunny skies and Popsicles.