I know now what I want to be when I grow up.
Honestly. The very best thing about blogging is the people that you meet. It’s a fact that kindred spirits really do exist and though they may live halfway around the world, you can befriend them and learn to know them and maybe, if you are lucky and a little stalkery persistant, actually bamboozle them into opening their home to you for a weekend. They may even provide food! They may even COMPLIMENT YOU ON YOUR HAIR.
My mom and I drove into the veritable wilderness a few hours from Boston and spent the majority of the drive into the outback saying “It’s so GORgeous” over and over like a mantra. Everywhere we looked was another lovely view: a little New England town with white clapboard houses and a duckpond. A lake with a house on a tiny island and a skin of shiny ice reflecting from its surface. A small and ancient weatherbeaten cemetery with tipsy gravestones. Mountains. More lakes. Fields full of giant craggy boulders, lined with handpiled stone walls.
Then we got to Bluepoppy’s home and spent another several hours saying the SAME THING, only about every room in the house and every THING in the house and about our hostess herself, who was so lovely (and obviously as nervous as me, which was so totally endearing) and about her 3 darling doggities, who honestly must be the best-behaved and most obedient beasties on the planet, while still remaining chockfull of personality. She fed us and let us choose our own bedrooms (I got the one with the VIEW) and gave us huge white fluffsome towels and then allowed us to keep her up late talking and talking and talking.
We zoomed down the mountain and around town the next morning, buying feasty nibbles for lunch, stopped by the iced-in beach and then zipped back up to sit out in the field soaking up sunshine until the arrival of the ALSO GORGEOUS Christina, she of the darling dimples, and then we ate and gabbed and climbed a mountain and ate and gabbed some more.
I did not want to leave, not ever. Luckily, we pulled the “Oops, we forgot something at your house” trick, so we can maybe just drive 2 hours back up there tomorrow night bringing pizza or chinese take-out as a love offering, just so we can snatch another couple of hours in paradise.
All the way back to Boston, where we met up with e11en and spent a lovely couple of hours walking around the city in the sunshine, before ending up at the Bluepoppy-recommended (and excellent, natch’) Trident Bookstore & Cafe, I was thinking that this is why I blog. It may not have been the reason I started blogging, and it may not be the ONLY reason, but it sure hit home today: I blog because of the friends I have made, the friends I am making and the friends I will make through this journal, this online forum.
In some ways it would be SO great if I could live closer to all these amazing people I have gotten to know. If everyone could move to some centrally located place where we could all hang out and talk and laugh and do inspiring, creative, interesting things together. And in another other way, I am perfectly aware that the reason WHY this weekend was so magical was BECAUSE we live so far apart, and because we must snatch these moments of perfection from our lives and make the most of them when they happen. I send profound thanks to these wise souls, these wonderful women, who helped create this amazing weekend and let me be a part of it. They both opened up their hearts and let me in. I’m a better person for it.
So yeah, I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be Bluepoppy.
