415 West Hickory Apartment B

It seems many of my good friends, Soul Blistas, have extra cause to celebrate this holiday season.  As I've blogged before, Brendee is engaged but Kevo and his Vanessa are expecting.  With all the good news flying around the level of emailing has been up, and along with the influx of correspondence we've each in our own way been reminiscing.

Brendee dug up this picture today.  It was taken in front of my little tree-house apartment on Hickory street back in 2004, I think.  Before the Forsyths were parents.  Before Stacy was a mom.  If I remember correctly Marina, our dutch friend, took this picture.  I loved that little apartment with hardwood floors and a weird door from the kitchen to the bedroom and the holes under the windows that were as big as my finger and not insulated or patched.  I would sleep with the screenless windows open when it was nice and my cat Andy, short for androgynous, would stare out the windows and make the squirrels bark.  A few times a neighborhood cat joined us through the open window and Andy chased him off.  I remember so many things about that period in my life.  Standing next to my refrigerator, something was always going down in the kitchen, when Rachel told me she was pregnant.  That was where Marina almost drove her rental car through the lawn (scary) and Becky Camp and I locked ourselves out when the screen door somehow happened to latch itself.  Andy attacked a French guy, must of given him cat scratch fever because we never saw him again after that. (He was kind of strange anyway looked like the scissor wielding bald guy from Stephen King's Insomnia)  Brendee and I became really good friends in that apartment.  That's where Stacy and I became friends too, before she was just a friend of B and Rachel.  We drank A LOT of wine in that place, on the steps and the lawn.  That's where No Shower Sunday was born.

But what really got to me about this photo was not the remembering but the unremembered, the forgotten.  I had forgotten about that picture until Brendee sent it out today.  How many other things have I, or we, misfiled or shoved aside to make room for new memories.  Hmm. 

Once remembered those moments in time are sweeter than any candy.  I almost said it was like money found in a winter pocket, but it's not it's better.  I spend money I find no matter how long it was in my pocket, but those moments....I'm putting them in the vault.