I could never be Amish

Sometimes, Facebook annoys the hell out of me, but you know why I stick around? Dani.

Dani moved to the small village in southeastern New York where I grew up the summer before seventh grade. Her family only stayed for that year, and then they moved to Georgia. We wrote letters. We hung out one day the summer after high school when she was up visiting her grandparents. We emailed a little after that, but eventually lost touch. Shortly after my mom died, Dani and I connected again on Facebook.*

During the hardest period of my life, she was there in ways people who had known me longer and better and lived closer weren't.

She told me about her life, about her sisters (it still freaks me out that they are all grown up -- I picture them as the small people they were when they lived around the corner 20 years ago). She told me about her mom's MS. (I didn't know Dani's mom all that well when they lived nearby, but she always reminded me of my mom -- the kind of lady that didn't take crap from anyone.)

Just a few minutes ago, Dani texted me a picture of her mom with the red notebook. (This is probably because Dani temporarily unfriended and blocked me from Facebook last night so that I can't see any of the things she's doing with the notebook. The suspense is kind of killing me. The picture text was a nice reprieve from the suspense, and it definitely made me a little teary.)

I have no idea what else Dani is doing with the notebook, how she's planning to create awesome, but that picture was a bit of awesome for me, just a couple weeks after my mom's third deathiversary. 



*About a year later, a similar thing happened with another childhood friend who turned out to live IN THE SAME STATE as me. That's reason enough to stay on Facebook.