Ganeida's Knots

“A visitor to a Quaker meeting stands up after five minutes of silence and asks, "When does the service begin?" An old Friend rises after a brief reflection and says, "Service begins when the worship ends” Anon

The boys have gone home. The cousins have left. Siano has arrived. It has been raining steadily for a week & the kids have used every towel in the house. I am down to my last spare set of sheets. Siano was lucky. There were sheets & under a pile of wrapping paper in a bedroom someone's forgotten present turned out to be a brand new towel! It looks like it will be a while before my house returns to some semblance of order though last night we had the first proper meal in 3 days! You know, one I actually had to cook rather than throwing together leftovers.

Issi has collapsed from the heat ~ & sheer exhaustion. All those strange people wandering through his house! He has been very rattled & not himself for days. Siano he loves. Siano brings goodies for him in her bag ~ & he knows it. He was twinning anxiously around her ankles the moment she was through our door. She did not fail him. Such a spoilt moggy!

Siano has plans to educate me. As a Brisbane girl she is about to take it upon herself to introduce me to the hidden delights of Brisbane, delights that have so far evaded me. She assures me that Brisbane has its Darlinghurst/Paddington/Glebe equivalents; bookshops of note; the weird, the wonderful & the strange just like The Cross [Sydney Cross, which is an experience, I can assure you, though the real Cross is the beautiful old houses & gardens out of sight of the red light strip!☺] I am happy to be educated. We shall make a day of it. Take Ditz. Now that should make things interesting. I have never met anyone so resistant to learning. So enamoured of the fine art of ennui. It's a teen thing. One day she'll grow out of it & be mightily embarrassed by herself.

Meanwhile we will talk till our tongues are like to drop off. We have a friendship that goes back 30 years to our uni days & all night coffee benders to get essays of acceptable standard written before deadlines. We both majored in literature but Siano has a logical. rational side to her that is missing from my genetic make~up & did her minor in biology ~ a quirk in her nature that gives me peeks into a strange & alien world unavailable to me by other means. Siano is enough the right~brained novel~reading book~writing friend to explain the fascination of biology in a way I can actually understand & appreciate ~ minus the ooey~gooeys. I don't do ooey~gooeys. Yuk!

Ah! Old friendships are the best friendships. There's nothing quite like someone who's known you most of your life, seen the best & worst of you & likes you anyway.