Wednesday, after another blizzard and before the next

Can you tell I am tired of continuous snow?

Monday into Tuesday we got at least a foot of snow at our house. The back deck was impressive with the snow piled up 1.5 feet and drifting up past the window sills. Taciturn dug out the driveway, the front porch and to the back door on the deck for a total of three hours yesterday afternoon.

Another storm is headed our way on Friday. My much anticipated Container Gardening class (only way I can garden; I live on an acre lot but it is on an 8% grade with herds of deer tramping through almost continuously) was scheduled for this Saturday. It has been postponed until May 2nd. Grumble.

Saturday T and I went to the Black Hills Builders Home Show. In the past, we've always enjoyed this show but this year it was like, "Ok, let's go simply because we go every year." We ran into every person we never wanted to run into again. Especially I ran into a former friend and her husband.

This is one of two people who are officially "former friends." The other one joined a Willow Creek based church and became viciously anti-everything; I called her on it and she said we could no longer be friends, and oh btw I must not be a Christian. I'm just glad she isn't God. The woman I saw Saturday is the only friend I have ever felt like I was divorcing. It happened when the blinders came off and I saw that she just needed someone to boss around and I was that person. We really had little in common. I realized those two things when she and her husband, temporarily homeless through circumstance, came to stay with me when T was stationed in Korea. Oh, btw, her husband had at one time been T's boss.

Suddenly they were my parents and I was the teenaged daughter. They didn't like how my furniture was arranged so they re-did it. They would watch my only TV and invite me to watch it with them. They screened my phone calls. They terrorized my elderly cat. They portioned out my food as they thought I ate too much (I lost a good bit of weight while they were with me, and they said it was due to them teaching me how to eat properly). And she criticized my going to church. I was too educated to believe in air.

There were other things too. After three months (one of which I was in Korea with T), I came home from an errand to find some more stuff rearranged. I said that I preferred it the regular way. My friend drew herself to her full height and asked, "May I ask why?"

"Because this is my house and that is how I like it," I snapped.

She jerked back as if I'd slapped her. "Well!" she said. I heard her a couple of days later on the phone telling someone that she was still awaiting her apology.

My thought was that if she wanted me to apologize for wanting things my way in my house, she would be waiting a very, very long time.

They moved out into the house of another friend that weekend.

And that was that. And that was four years ago.

You must understand that I loved this friend so much that I was unsure that I had done the right thing. I even went to my priest to talk to him about it. He had heard me complain about her for months; he was astonished that I needed to ask! I don't remember exactly what he said but it was on the order of "What took you so long?"

I was incredibly angry and told everyone I knew all that she had done to me. Sounds like what people do when they are divorcing, doesn't it? I regret that I had spread the news, so to speak. But I did. Then we moved away to Washington DC.

Fast forward to Saturday. The guys, who had been friends themselves (I thought), were chatting like crazy (my biggest regret of all of this was that the guys had to side with their wives). As she and I chatted, I mentioned in the course of something else I wanted to tell her that I had been to seminary for a year--her smile turned brittle and she cut me off. The goal of what I was saying was not to brag about being to seminary but to tell her about a serendipitous thing involving one of my seminary pals. But she heard "seminary" and that was all, for her.

The guys exchanged phone numbers. But I bet we don't hear from them. T said later that he never thought of my friend's husband as his friend; he was his boss, nothing more. So they won't hear from us, either.

Sometimes things really suck, don't they?