Work and friendship.

I felt like a wounded bear today. I countered it with work. I gave my whole day to HorseBack and that was a good thing. My mother would have liked that.

In the evening, I wrangled with the Skype and suddenly there was the dear face of one of my oldest friends, many thousands of miles away, all the way from the west coast of America, where she lives.

We talked about my mother’s death and hers; we talked about her childhood and mine; we talked about the days when we were undergraduates together and ran around together getting into mischief. We cried and we laughed. I felt soothed to depths of my soul.

I’ve always thought that friendship was as fine a love as romantic love, if not finer. (Oh, all right, I secretly think it is finer.) It’s just it never got the press. It did not get the poets and the playwrights and the novelists hot under the collar. There is no friend equivalent of Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice or Romeo and Juliet.

I survive happily and soundly and easily without romantic love. I was never any good at it. I could not survive without my friends.

 

Today’s pictures:

My dear comrade in arms. Very old and blurry photographs, but you can see why I love her so much: