unshelled

Friday night spent napping, cleaning, cooking up the tomatoes and such piled in bowls in the kitchen straight from the garden, cleaning out the fridge, cutting out the bad spots, enough food to last a week and freeze some, and then an invited guest and an unexpected one, the first night I've spent in good conversation on the back porch in total darkness. Tales of service industry and old neighborhoods and wannabe suburban gangstas and old mutual friends, 2am comes quickly and we're devouring stir-fry in the kitchen as I get more incoherent with fatigue and thankful that I can sleep in.

A wedding the next day, two friends finally tying the knot, a church and then a hall full of people I know, and with two cups of coffee in my veins, I'm bouncing from table to table catching up with people I don't see nearly enough, meeting new souls, hearing tales of Bulgaria behind the iron curtain and becoming embroiled in a debate about organ transplants over dessert because this is how me and my sister's friends roll and our friends converged at this celebration.

One girl remembers me from the days when I had friends in the next county over because she was the little kid who lived next door watching us older teenage girls with our baggy jeans and ball chains and thrift store t-shirts as we'd make up stupid punk rock songs that we recorded on an old boombox with a bongo drum and a cheap electric guitar that we occasionally serenaded the neighborhood with and had inside jokes that made no sense, usually involving Kid Rock because this was when nu-metal ruled the universe. We would walk around the boonies to hang out at the playground with juice bought at the Sparkle Market, do snow angels in random people's yards, draw anarchy symbols on the paper placemats at the diner. I'm sure we were totally obnoxious in the way that only punkass teenage girls can be. I made so many mixtapes for the one sister who discovered punk rock at the same time as me but she preferred Good Charlotte to Fugazi despite all such propagandizing on my part.

I have no memory of this girl whatsoever, which is strange because I remember everything, and I wonder what parts of this she remembers. I'm past being embarrassed because this was from such another lifetime ago.

I once hated going to weddings, but when they're packed with those I love and those I've yet to meet, when people are friendly and it's not because they're drunk, when no one's shoving me towards the dance floor full of sucky music or tossing a damn bouquet and reminding me of my perpetual spinsterhood, these are nice things, and I socialize for awhile, until the introversion returns and I walk back to the in-laws to get the car and return home to tea and books, and a quiet Sunday of good conversations beneath shady trees and solo darkthroning through the neighborhood.

Today's already crazy, I wonder how this bodes for a semester of old-school geekery of the Roman empire kind and what new issues we Social Workers for the Damned shall face.