Twists and Turns

Through some twists and turns of events, I am  happy to announce that I have welcomed a guest blogger to the Life on Manitoulin blog! Please welcome Beth Richards. She’ll be blogging here every now and then. I’ll let her introduce herself to you now!

I am ever grateful to the twists & turns of fate that led me back to the island. My son is happy, my dogs are in great shape (and I’m working on mine!), the kitten we adopted turned out to be a very small cat and is now in heat (yeeoow!), and I’ve finally made friends with a woman I’ve been drawn to for a long while: Christine. Ironically, she lives around the corner from us. We often crossed paths, both of us thinking, “…Hmm, great vibes, got to know!” but we have been so busy with our lives the opportune moment never appeared. So how and why did we meet now? That may be where fate comes in!

Yesterday morning I went walking by a river with my dogs Rosie and Mishi. Rosie disappeared. Suddenly I saw her below the bridge I was standing on, flailing at the ice with most of her body submerged. She must have gone down to the river for a drink, in between the ice flows. Her powerful upper body was thrashing. Whenever she tried to crawl out, the ice would break and she’d slip back in. I was frantic, calling out, begging her to keep trying. I rolled down the deep snow on the banks of the river to rescue her and fell, twisting my knee badly. That`s when she managed to get a grip on the ice and drag herself out. Trust a dog’s love! Rosie’s concern for me was what gave her the oomph to save herself. By the time I crawled back up the bank Rosie was wagging her tail and begging to resume our walk. But my knee was wrecked so I piled the dogs back into the car and drove home.

As fate would have it, when I pulled into the driveway my car got stuck! I`m a single mom and having lived in the bush on my own, I know how to tough it out and do most things by myself. Normally I would have tried to shovel, or waited for my son to get home from school. But with my bunged up knee I looked up Christine`s phone number and called her, hoping that her husband could plow my drive and unstuck my car. It doesn`t take a wizard to see that I just used that as an excuse to call her. I know, I know! I should have called her long ago instead of waiting for a wounded knee and stuck car! I often wanted to but the truth is, I`m pretty shy in person. Bold in print, shy in person! I`m just glad I called, regardless of the excuse. And within a few seconds I completely forgot about the stuck car.

We started talking, the kind of conversation where you`re often talking at once because there`s so much to say, so much to catch up on (like you’ve known each other forever!). You must know the feeling. You’re saying “Me, too!”, “I get it!”, “Same here!” over and over. I call that experience, ‘finding your tribe’. Tribe is different from family, friends, or acquaintances. They can be the same but often they`re different. The tribe I`m talking about isn`t defined by race, color, blood ties or age. It`s deeper than all of that. Call it a spiritual thing, a `soul family` perhaps, but there are only certain people who are your ‘tribe’. It`s the person you can call up in the middle of the night sobbing, or maybe even laughing your head off, and they don’t freak out. They laugh with you, or they just listen while you vent and cry until you’re done. And the whole time, you know they aren’t multi-tasking or looking at their partner with that ‘oh my god it’s her again’ look. You know, instead, that they’re with you 100% and that they’ll drop everything to help you. And vice versa. So that’s how I felt when I finally talked with Christine.

Have you found your ‘tribe’?

Thanks for the intro, Beth!  Look for Beth’s upcoming posts! She’s full of humour, wit, and insight.