Come walk with me

A few years ago, right after we had moved to a new base, my doorbell rang late on a Sunday night. It was a group of young girls dressed up in women's bodies, and they invited me to come out and take a walk. These neighborhood women were unfamiliar to me, but I gathered up the courage to say yes, anyway. I left my small children home with my husband, and started a journey that changed my life. Every Sunday night, this group of women would start walking around the neighborhood, ringing doorbells and picking up other friends. We would walk and talk about husbands, children, school, losing weight, gaining weight, books, and all sorts of trivia. We also talked about our heartaches, heartbreaks, and daily miracles. Faces changed as time wore on and families moved in and out of the neighborhood, but the tradition kept on. The common experience of sisterhood wove our hearts together as we walked. There were hot dry nights where we walked through sprinklers, and cold windy ones where we were bundled up to our eyeballs, but still we walked. There was a night where some sisters split off to try mattress-surfing with a mattress they had found among other treasures put out at the side of the road. I discovered kindred spirits inside women who seemed so different than me: different backgrounds, different life experiences. Those walks refreshed my spirit, kept me sane, and reminded me that someone else always had more serious problems than I did. So even though we have all scattered far and wide, this blog is for all of those sisters to come and walk together again.