From Ely, with Love

She calls it her "ESP."  When she tells me, "it's my ESP" she means that she has a gut feeling that cannot be explained.  She gets this a lot.  In fact it happens between us a lot.  I will think of her out of the blue and then BAM she will call.  Or vice-versa.  It is a little weird and often we will say now that it is a "God thing".  God seems to like the weird.  

Anyways, last night we received a package from WAY up north in MN, where she resides.  The package, true to form, was stuffed to the brim with all things shiny, sparkly, glittery and messy.  In a word, perfection.  My boys were enthralled.  I choked back tears.  

Because there, stuffed in the middle of that big ol' bursting (literally) at the seams previously shipped box was a token of our 20+ year friendship.  (30 years if you count the fact that we danced together in dance class as four year olds.)   

An ugly as sin plastic pineapple is our token.  First given to me, by her when I moved away to college. She told me that she had heard somewhere that when you give a person a pineapple it means "welcome" and that since I was moving into a new place she wanted me to feel welcome there.  Or something like that, it was a long time ago.  I have never attempted to confirm or deny the story she "heard", simply because it didn't matter if anyone, anywhere, at any point in time had ever given a pineapple as a welcome gift.  What mattered was that it was her thing.  A thing that became ours. 

Over the years that pineapple has been given back and forth several times.  When she first moved out of the dorms, when I moved to Colorado, when she bought her first house, when I bought mine, when the "new house" was left behind and a new adventure up north began... each new move symbolizing growth, change, tears, excitement, pain, step forwards and seemingly steps back.  Each move has taken us further apart in mileage.  Now, even when I come "home" to MN, she is still five hours away. (She says four hours, but that is 'cause she drives like a maniac.)

And yet, when I pulled that pineapple out of the package, I never felt closer to her.  In that one token, a whole conversation happened.  A conversation that spans decades into the past and decades into the future.  A token that says wherever I am, wherever you are, no matter how far, you are always welcome.

And that is the story of how this hideous pineapple has come to reside once again in my kitchen.  Ugh...   

PS.  I have to wonder if it was her ESP that sensed at some point in time I would be residing in the land of the pineapples...