A fond farewell

Two of our dearest friends are heading to the UK due to a work transfer. Bob and Lindy-Lou have been dear to my heart since we met in second year uni and we discovered a mutual love of food and all things Italian (Lindy-Lou is Italian and her family commits every endearing stereotype you can imagine of an Italian family living in Wollongong). And now they are leaving. Its not that we see each other that often, but its the comfort knowing they are nearby. There is a bad ugly selfish level to all this as well - on my part that is. (I also never learn as similar bad selfish thoughts re another friend's overseas trip a few years back became the death knell for what had been one of my dearest, most valued friendships.) Tomorrow they head off for a week of reconnaissance to check out Bob's new workplace and suss out some nice parts of town they could live in. They found out on Tuesday, they go tomorrow. The word 'spontaneity' comes to mind. The most spontaenous I get to be now is deciding whether to have the baked beans or tinned spaghetti toasted sandwich at lunch. Only to be always crushed on finding that yes, there may be two tins in my drawer but no, they are of the same contents - usually the one didn't choose. Don't get me wrong, their lives are not peachy clean or without heart-ache and worries, and they both work bloody hard at what they do to as well as being probably the most divine friends in the known universe. But as I will return tonight to a home that looks like an abandoned derelict student-furniture-filled abode, trip on a truck, impale my foot on a piece of lego and survey the wreckage of a life filled with choices I made, it dawns on me that there are times when the feeling of your life taking place in quicksand are heightened so dramatically, you feel you can't even draw a decent breath. I know that sensation will pass, that my kids will run at me with such glee that I am home and regale me with stories on their playground antics (normally involving a war or kung-fu fight of some sort) and how the best part of their day was me coming home, and I know my Lindy-Lou and Bob will return a few years down the track, but sometimes its just nice to wallow.