Feeding those who feed you...

Life comes full circle…every single time… The past couple of years found me cleaning out my friendship closets… I was making sure that like clothes… All the friendships that hung in there were ones I wore… That felt good when I put them on… And that I would wear over and over again… This whole thing started over twenty-five years ago… Though I didn’t know it at the time… I remember it was nineteen-eighty one… I was living in Germany, my husband had just received a significant promotion… I was working on my first ‘real’ job…read ‘money’… I was in my early twenties…had a one year old, beautiful, healthy baby boy… I was living honey… My mom who absolutely adored her ‘Angi’ would call me every two weeks… And I was supposed to call her the following two weeks… This was before fifty cents a minute international calls… a ten minute call was about thirty dollars… Anyway… Sometimes I would call her… Often not…one day she told me about myself… She said, ‘Baby I don’t care how far you go, or how much you get, you should always feed those who feed you,’ talk about a blow to the solar-plexus… I straightened out and never forgot that… Talked to my mom weekly from then on…daily when she was in her last days…. Well about two years ago… I found myself in a similar, yet different situation… I had all these friendships… That amounted to nothing…really… I had become friends with a gang of folks… Through convenience… Mostly their convenience… I am very self-contained, hardly ever seek out folks…but they came looking for me... My door, particularly at work always had someone in it… I was usually exhausted by the end of the day and it had very little to do with my workload… One day I had an epiphany… I was surrounding myself with folks who I fed but… Did very little to feed me… So little by little I started reducing my intake… While working on quality meals… Feeding myself from a pool of folks who fed me… It has been absolutely amazing… How with such a limited buffet… I am never hungry… But completely nourished… My mama was a wise woman… acVernon Menchan

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