Once Upon a Love Shack...

Once upon a time I was off at college. Art & I had become friends just in time for me to move 8 hours away. Did made sure we kept in touch & saw each other on breaks. In February (I think) of my freshman year, Art decided to move out of her parents' house. Because they wanted to keep her close to home, they decided to rent her the apartment that was attached to the back of their house. It wasn't technically in the basement, but jutted out from the back of the basement and into the yard.

Once she was settled Did decided I needed to move in with her. QM & Daddy had moved Princess into my room shortly after I'd left for college (we only had 3 bedrooms and she'd been sharing with Bubba since we moved in 5+ years earlier). I was pretty sure I didn't want to come home from college where I'd experienced my first taste of freedom and share a room with my 12 year old sister. Did figured me moving in with Art was the perfect solution.

To be honest, I was a little nervous. Art & I were friends, but she was closer to Did (as was I), and we were fairly new friends. I wasn't sure I wanted to live with someone I didn't know all that well. I really liked her, but was mostly unsure of myself & therefore of any new friendships. In the end I decided I could try it out & at least I wouldn't be back home (evil of all evils at the age of 19).

I moved in the day I came home from school (much to QM & Daddy's chagrin) which was also my 19th birthday. I had no job. I had no car. I had no drivers license. But I was sure it would all be fine. Youthful optimism or bull headedness?

In the long run, it wasn't exactly fine. I made bad choices. I had no money. I was selfish & uncaring when it came to anything that didn't directly effect me. I behaved in a way I knew was wrong. I'd been raised better than that. BUT...and this is a big BUT...I made the best friend I've ever had.

Art & I quickly bonded. We lived in a tiny little dump. We were the worst house keepers you have ever met (like the time we left a pot roast in the unplugged crock pot for nearly a month....or the piles of garbage in the kitchen because we regularly forgot garbage day....or the vast mounds of laundry you had to wade through to make it to the couch...or the fact that there were almost never clean dishes to be found...or that by the time we made it to the laundry mat we could take up an entire wall of washers and dryers with what we'd hauled in...or...well, you get the picture). We barely made ends meet most moths. I was a waitress at a steak house & Art worked at a dry cleaners, then as a telemarketer, then at Checkers. It's not that we didn't make enough money to pay our $200 a month rent, it's that we spent every dime we made as soon as we made it. We forgot to pay our phone bill on occasion. We lived on take out from our restaurants and Waffle House and Taco Bell. We rarely made it to bed before 4 am. We rarely made it out of bed before noon...and that could be a problem especially when either one of us had to work the lunch shift. Our roof leaked, the water heater rarely worked (and leaked), the glass in our back door was broken, the AC was unreliable, we had no cable (or TV for that matter), we almost never locked the door.

But we had a giant claw foot bathtub. We would sit in it and drink sparkling grape juice & apple cider. We sat in it and listened to Counting Crows. We sat in it and talked. We sat in it and cried over boys. We sat in it with anyone who came to visit. I think we spent more time sitting in that empty bathtub fully dressed than we spent actually bathing in it. On occasion I would come home at night to find all the couch cushions missing. Art would have them stuffed in the tub & would be fast asleep in it.

We named our apartment The Love Shack. We danced to Sheryl Crow's version of Dyer Maker around the wall that formed our apartment into a sort of circle (called dancing the circle). We stocked up on junk food just before a snow storm would hit & invited Did over to be snowed in with us (although our reason for inviting her was so we'd have someone to fight with other than each other). We adopted an all black kitten that we named Lamentations Floyd but he ran away after about 3 weeks (can you blame him?). We hung out at the park until well after hours (or until the police ran us off). We sang loudly. We danced wildly. We laughed hysterically. We had fun...sometimes too much fun.

In the end we both moved in with a girl I worked with, but it didn't last long. Art moved back into the apartment to save up for her wedding & I moved to Illinois to live with Uncle Gick & Unkie Di. For a few years our friendship cooled a bit. We were both newly married. We lived hours apart. Art had a new baby. We talked occasionally, but things were different.

When things got really tough for Art our friendship rekindled. We'd never really stopped being friends, but we were suddenly closer than we'd been in years. Now we talk constantly, she's been adopted by my folks as their 4th child, we've carried each other through some really hard times, we've laughed over the phone till all hours of the night, we've sat on QM's deck until our kids were falling asleep in the living room, we've prayed for each other, we've cried for each other & we've supported each other.

And all because of Did & a dingy little apartment called The Love Shack.