Saying goodbye to a friend.....

     Blogging is about life, the ups and downs and backwards and, hopefully, the moving forward too. Sometimes blogging can be a bit of a diary of one's life, the one your nosy little brother reads (or in my case, family I don't speak with). That's what makes blogging real. No baking project ever turns out perfectly, no garden yields perfect results. Blogs tell the truth, which isn't always joyous and pretty.

     Today I lost a very good friend. I first met Karen nearly seven years ago through our mutual love of vintage and freecycle. Karen and I were both often purging our overloaded houses on the freecycle network which often meant snapping up each other's finds. What started as arranged pick up times and trading ended up being conversations over tea and a friendship that remained even when she moved off the mountain and distance was put between us.

     The really great friendships, those of mutual understanding and affection, do survive distance and time constraints. This friendship was still going strong. You may remember that recently I had watched my good friend Karen's quirky little Mutt Betty White. Today, I am facing the silence of a life too short. Karen is gone and with her I feel a hole in my chest. I've cried a lot, spent some time in bed because I simply couldn't think what else to do. Even now between sentences I find myself staring out the window at nothing at all and remembering Karen's smile and insanely good sense of humor.

     It's hard to write a post like this, and even harder to end it. So, I'll leave you with this quote which says it better than I could....

"When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile." unknown