Skip to main content

I keep losing track of the days....

Which is what generally happens to me when the kids are out of school and I'm not on a regulated work schedule.

There have been ups and there have been downs. I suppose that's life on this planet. I won't bore you will all of the mundane details.

I was feeling the nudge to write yesterday...just a tiny flicker of what I used to feel. It's been a while since I've written too awful much.

On Thursday night last week I had two old friends over for dinner. It was Kathy's mom Sally and Kathy's sister, Sherrie.

Kathy was my bestest friend when we were fourteen. She was murdered when we were both that age.... Something like that leaves a huge hole in you as an adolescent. I think as you grow older it comes back to you in moments you don't expect.

At any rate, the dinner was wonderful. Spending time with Sally and Sherrie was sweet. Sally brought a book when she came--a scrapbook. There were baby pictures of Kathy, toddler pictures, home taken pictures all the way up to when her last pictures were taken and posted in newspapers. Newspaper articles with her pictures and official notes from the men working on her case. I slowly turned each page and recalled my time in a dusty Thurston County Sheriff's office a few years ago. I had boxes and boxes of evidence from the trial, and boxes of pictures. Pictures I now wish I'd never seen. I shook off those dark days and closed Sally's scrapbook.

Having them here was sweet...and sad. We've kept in touch all these years. Lost each other, found each other again. We've all lived our lives in the past 36 years...married, had children, some now have grandchildren. Moved away, moved back. Loved, loved and lost...our hair is slowly turning gray, our bodies slowing down. We shared our stories with each other, with Kathy sitting quietly in the back of our minds.

I wonder...how many children would she have now? Would I be able to tease her about her gray hair or the wrinkles around her eyes? I hope we'd be able to laugh about that old couch in her garage that used to be OUR hangout. The black light and the fun. I wish I could connect with her on Facebook, or text her a funny message.

But I can't. William Cosden Jr. made sure of that when he took her life. I'm thankful he's in prison and can't hurt anymore girls.

But I sure wish I could talk to Kathy one more time too...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Online Friends

I'm sure you've heard by now that blue is the new black, forty is the new thirty and they're lying through their teeth when they say that last thing. Also, imaginary childhood friends (you know you had one) have been replaced with online friends. They're the same in that no one ever really sees them, but you talk to them, you play with them, your other friends and family think you're just this side of a restraining jacket and you're a lot older than you were when you first had friends you never saw. Sure they're real you might say in that mocking tone you have . Well stop that. Save your mocking for later on when I tell you all about my Internet friends. No, I can't see them, or touch them, although some of them have asked me....um, well, we'll go into that later. People have become friends with other people across the world, sometimes they've become friends with people they'd never become friends with in RL. That means real life for ...

The Boy

Will Soon Be Graduating From High School This means, in some small measure, I have successfully managed to get him through 12 years of school and to the age of 18 alive. No small accomplishment, that. Today he called for a ride home after he rode the bus most of the way to our house. As it was about 90 degrees outside, I obliged. I'm a good mom, plus it got me out of a very hot house and into the sweet deliciousness of my air conditioned vehicle. My oldest and youngest daughters went along for the ride and they spotted The Boy before I did. "What's up with his pants?" Indeed. The operative word for his pants was up . He wears those extremely skinny jeans and he'd rolled them up to about knee level and he was walking towards us with a grimace on his face. He was in pain. You see, five hours earlier, in the throes of near heat exhaustion, he rolled the legs of his pants up and then his legs swelled up. He was unable to remove his own pants or roll down what he...

Wheeeeeeee!

Today I was awakened to the not-so-delightful sounds of enormous dump trucks, (you know the ones that are a dump truck and they haul a trailer behind?) dumping truck load after truck load of dirt behind my house. Then the most incredibly noisey and squeaky (do they not grease the tracks on those things??) grader began shoving the dirt and rocks around. I had to fight the urge to throw a can of WD40 over the fence to the driver. It wasn't even eight in the morning. It wasn't even 7:30 yet. So I reluctantly arose from my bed and cleaned up the kitchen. After it was spotless, I went back upstairs to my freeze-zone (the only room in the house with AC) to do some online banking and make calls to check on medical bills, etc. As I was finishing up, in walks my husband! At first I had a moment of Oh-no-he's-lost-his-job terror. Then it passed after he smiled. Seems they ran out of work for the day. Odd, but then that's Boeing. So hubby was roped into going school cloth...