Family ties

Terra and I met over a year ago at a TES tng meeting. I forget what the topic was, but I was telling someone about a series of books by Anne Bishop they might like when she stood up from the other end of the table, and proclaimed, loudly: "OH MY GOD! ANNE BISHOP'S BLACK JEWEL TRILOGY ARE THE BEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN!!!" We've been best friends and leather sisters ever since.

She and I have seen each other through countless crisis and drama, we run to each other when we have a bad scene, or a bad day, taking comfort in one another's presence. We tell each other jokes and make fun of each other endlessly. We are almost always laughing when we are together. People often ask us if we're girlfriends, and we shake our heads no. If Terra and I ever had sex it would be beyond incest and would just destroy our friendship.

When it came to light that she would be an orphan for thanksgiving this year, I invited her to thanksgiving dinner with my family. So we all piled into the station wagon and drove off to my cousins house in Conn.

We faced little traffic, and along the way, Terra told me about her family tree, after informing me that I would be attending her family reunion with her, and that by the way, I would have to learn the electric and the cha-cha slide before we went down south.

We got there about noon, and I was starving, I kept eye balling the stuffing and the turkey, and I was consistently shooed out of the kitchen by my various family members. Terra and I started talking about inconsequential things, waiting for dinner to be served. Finally we all got out plates and lined up at the buffet to serve ourselves. Terra and I laughed over the fact that we had been relegated to the 'kiddie table' where we ate in stone cold silence until my aunt, ever the instigator, asked the question that turned my dinner into a stone in my belly.

"So, how did you two meet?" She asked. My entire family went dead quiet, and I was aware of everyone staring at me. I looked at Terra, and Terra stared at her plate. I was tempted to kick her under the table. "We met at a dinner party through a friend of ours, we were reading the same book, and just started talking about it," I said, amazed that I had managed to keep the note of uncertainty out of my voice.

The conversation went right back to politics, as if the question had never been asked, and we breathed a silent sigh of relief.

After we had been released from the the table, we put on a movie, and started talking. "Great," I laughed. "My family thinks I'm a lesbian, it's partially true too, so no one will spaz if I ever get the girlfriend I've been trying to find and bring her to Christmas dinner or something." Terra laughed. "I want a video recording of that dinner when it happens."

We turned our attention to the movie, 'Dreamgirls', and talked intermittently about music stolen from black artists, relationships, dreams, and caught each other up on other things that we can't discuss in front of my family at dinner or in the car on the drive up.

When it was time to go, we all said goodbye to my family to begin the drive home. Only it was dark and we couldn't find our way back to the road. The thing about where my family is in Conn. is that its so isolated there are no street lamps to light the way, so you can't read the few street signs that there are when you need to get your bearings. We drove around the woods for about an hour before we finally got directions and made our way back to the main road that would ultimately take us to the high way.

On the drive home, Terra and I giggled and wrote notes to each other on our cell phones about the days events. When we got to the house, we just brushed our teeth and fell into bed, tomorrow, after all, was another day.