!F for friends
 --- 
agk's diary 
14 October 2021 @ 11:24
 --- 
written on Pinebook Pro at Madeline's house in the woods
while most of the children play outside
 --- 

Heather cuts the hood pattern for one of Madeline's 
kids' halloween costumes. My baby's asleep in a swath
of osnaburg fabric on Evy's back. This house was built
from trees felled and milled by Madeline's husband. 
Adults and children come and go from the house, up and 
down the steep rutted gravel road where Madeline's 
husband has the van on jackstands to get at the wheel
bearings.

Almost ten years ago I left Esther and needed a place 
to tenderly remake myself into a better woman. I stayed 
near here, a welcome guest on women's land. Almost 20 
years ago, looking to be useful and have adventures, I 
met Madeline here.

Friends from Georgia visited earlier this month. I
barely saw them. I was up at 4:30 every morning 
during their visit to go to work or clinicals, home
at 20:00 or 21:30 in scrubs I couldn't wait to get 
out of. They came and watched the baby while Evy and 
I worked. At night they slept in a nearby motel.

It's a fabric of friends woven in time from found 
strands. We infrequently maintain and mend it with 
visits, chats, fun times, care. We figure ways through 
life, sometimes together---freely, voluntarily. We've
seen each others' weakness and our own in sight of the 
other. We fashioned ourselves after each other. We 
remember our dead.

Foucault, in 1981, gave an interview published as 
"Friendship as a Way Of Life." I've loved it a long 
time. Way of life he said "can be shared among in-
dividuals of different age, status, and social activ-
ity. It can yield intense relations not resembling 
those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that 
a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics."

He talked about heterotopia---the *other place* he 
lived and loved in as a gay man of his era. "To be 
'gay,' I think," (he said) "is not to identify with 
the psychological traits and the visible masks of the 
homosexual, but to try to define and develop [friend-
ship as] a way of life."

We found each other, recognized and loved each other. 
When we settled, some friendships endured time, dist-
ance, and wear, tough like osnaburg. Without marriage 
or paternity our woven love, memory, and way of life 
became durable, each other became us, the basic unit 
of a world.