life: catching up.

why does it feel like time speeds up when you leave town?

it starts the day you leave, when you feel hurried in your preparations to leave..

and carries through until a few days after you return.

that's where i'm at right now. between coming back from a mini-trip & trying to finish christmas projects, it's a little crazy around these parts.

(as in EVERY single piece of laundry is in a pile. clean. dirty. you name it!)

but... it was worth it. it was SO worth it!

when i was little we lived in miami. florida. my best friend was my cousin shelly. she was almost 2 years older than me, but we did everything imaginable together. she pushed me (in a good way) out of my box. she was the reason i slept in our hallway for a week... she made me watch nightmare on elm street at 6 years old. & in the center of her lemon yellow 7-year-old frilly canopy flocked bedroom was a freddy kruger poster that traumatized me every time i stayed at her house. she saved dogs, & plucked the tails off of lizards just to see them grow back.

i was ready to leave everything else behind when we left miami. everything but her. i was so sad. she came up a few summers after we moved, and stayed a couple weeks at a time. but the summer i was 12, she didn't come back. and i never saw her again...

until thursday.

it had been 20 years. TWENTY. & i have no reason why it took so long.

we wrote to each other off & on through middle & highschool & then we lost touch.

our grandfather's are brothers, and honestly had we both tried harder we would have talked alot sooner than about 3 years ago.

sad how you let your everyday life get in the way of things like that....

but onto my weekend. shelly & her family came down to florida to visit. mom & i decided to meet up with them at her parents house in labelle.

mason of course was in love with the golf cart. aren't little boys fascinated with anything with a steering wheel? that's mason, bradley, shelly & her little girl samantha.

bradley is my cousin chad's (shelly's brother) son. i haven't seen chad in 20 years either, likely it's been more than that..

labelle is this beautiful place surrounded by nothing. it's a little town that hasn't grown much since i was last there in 1980 something.. (and here is mason not wanting me to take his picture. big surprise)

samantha is shelly's daughter. she is a new big sister. vince is just a month younger than our little rance. (and i could really kill myself for not getting a picture of him!)

( see. told you it was beautiful there :) )

so. most people don't normally have construction equipment & old trucks in their yard you say? well that's family history. my great uncle (shelly's grandfather) owned an electrical company that my dad, her dad & my grandfather all worked at. it dissolved in the mid-80s.. and these are mechanical remnants of it...

(and apparently they haven't been giving a good washing since the mid-80s either!)

it's sad, really, the things we let slip by.

the things that mean soo much to us at one point, that slowly fade into a memory of another life.

i've been thinking a lot about what people mean to me, and about making an effort to make sure they stay in my life. it's so easy to get involved in your own world & fall out of touch with people you care about.

this entire thought process has me on a roll. i'm thinking of where to take it.........

xo-k

ps. i'm upset i didn't pull my camera out more. but i was so in the moment, i forgot. and i'm okay with that :)