Tonight I received an email from my good friend Carol, who I haven't talked to in at least a year and a half. That's one of the cool things about keeping this website - periodically, old friends have found me, and it's the best feeling to get an email from an old friend.

Just thinking about Carol reminds me of so many good times in my life. The first time I met her, I was working at Alternative, a health food store in Lubbock. She came in to buy our old espresso machine for a coffeehouse she gave life to called Renaissance - for you old school Lubbock peeps, you might remember this as the first incarnation of Renaissance, in the cool old building owned by St. Paul's UMC off 16th and Avenue X back in 1996 (later taken over by Jamie Brock & Co.) Even back then, she was hatching great ideas and then making them happen.

Later, she came back into the store and actually got a job there, and that's when we really got to know each other. Have you ever read any of Sark's books, like Inspiration Sandwich? Carol would take Sark's suggestions and breathe life in them - like the time she covered our cash register in little post-it notes that said "YES!" No explanation needed, just Yes. Try it sometime - leave notes for yourself that just say Yes. It sounds silly, but I promise it's inspiring by osmosis.

I remember going over to Carol's house for an Art Party once. There were just five of us, and Carol set up snack stations with candy and dried peaches and nuts and crackers all around her dining room table, and then set out watercolors, paper, colored pencils, crayons, markers, glitter, and glue all around the table. We had so much fun, just sitting around the table one afternoon, drawing and painting and snacking and laughing.

One afternoon, early in the summer, Carol moved her couches into the garage, and we spent a couple of hours hanging Christmas lights and arranging the couches and coffee table to face the garage doors. When evening fell, we turned on the Christmas lights, set up snack stations and opened the garage door. The neighborhood unfolded like a movie, and we had front row seats. We spent several nights that summer on those couches in the garage, just watching the neighborhood go by and night fall while giggling about this and that and the other thing.

That summer, I often read Carol paragraphs I had written (I did that a lot back then - wrote paragraphs describing something I thought was beautiful, just to save the image for future stories - I really need to find those sometime), she listened and said encouraging things that still mean a lot to me now. We made paper together and had garage sales and talked about ideas we had and what we wanted to do next. I actually wrote my application essay for AmeriCorps on her computer.

One week (I can't remember if it was that summer or later) Carol and I went on this crazy roadtrip - we took her parents luxury van (seriously, luxury - there was a big seat in the back that converted to a bed with the push of a button) and drove through Oklahoma and Kansas to Colorado, where we slept in her van (and a hostel, one night) and walked around Boulder and hung out with random people and spent the night at a camp one night and slept in the van in a restaurant parking lot the other. The entire trip was planned around finding inspiration for a magazine she was creating, so we would do silly things like walk into the gas station and interview the cashier.

Carol moved to Austin around the same time that I moved to Charleston for AmeriCorps, and we still kept in touch. When I moved to Austin after AmeriCorps ended - and then moved back to Lubbock four months later - she was there for me through all my transitional drama. I stayed at her cute little duplex in South Austin many times, we had Art Parties on her porch, I napped in her hammock. One time, after moving back to Dirt City, I came to Austin for the weekend and told Carol that I wanted to do nothing at all, just sleep and sit on her porch - and she let me. When Brad and I moved to Austin (she had already moved to the Northeast), I drove around and around her old neighborhood, looking for a cute duplex just like hers, and we ended up just a few blocks away.

Carol is one of my favorite people on the planet - super-creative, dreamy, silly, smart, complicated, inspirational, and FUN. Now, just thinking about her and all of the memories we shared, I feel sad that so much time has passed since I last talked to her, and SO EXCITED that she'll be visiting Austin in about a week.

YES!

Lucy loves you |