Soul Mates

As a young girl, a teenager, and even into my 20's, I believed the hardest part about love was finding someone with whom to fall IN love. That the searching and connecting was the challenge but once that person is found, once your eyes meet across a crowded room, then you are on Easy Street. The older I get, the more I realize the real work comes after the falling in love has happened, the work is staying in love.

I do believe my friend Michelle found the answer though:

I certainly feel most connected to my girlfriends. I am blessed to have a life rich with witty, wise and wonderful women. I have a friend who has a mind that creates sumptuous recipes and whose hands make meals over which we laugh and linger. And she can paint. And sculpt. Her doodles make my concentrated efforts at creating beauty look, at best, comical. I have friends who can spin letters into words that can make me laugh and weep, feel great joy and sadness, words that give me pause for thought as well as spur me onto action. I have friends who can turn squares of fabric into the story of my mother's life or create a warrior princess who sits guard at my desk. My friends make me brave and kick me in the seat of the pants and sit quietly when I don't want to be alone.

So perhaps the girls of "Sex and the City" got it right. We love men, love kisses and flirting and feeling like princesses. We even - insert gasp - love sex. We cry ourselves to sleep over some men and act like silly, goofy teenagers for others. We dress for them and paint our toes, we flip our hair and nibble our lower lip and act coy and demure. We literally put our best foot forward for certain men.

But if you want to know me, ask my girlfriends. They are the ones to whom I pose the complicated questions, the ones for whom I bring out my soap box and wax poetic. My girl friends are the ones who can tell my mood by the tone of my voice, the ones who can say "Don't you dare cry!" and make me stop or grasp my hand and soothe my tears. My girlfriends are my lifeline and, it seems, my soulmates!