Conveniently, work had given me an excuse, awesome in and of itself, to travel to Florida for
a few days and see someone very important to me. I'm bad at definitions, but what matters is I 
love her. My husband affectionately jokes about us using the title of "not-your-girlfriend". 
We rarely get to see one another, and I sometimes think that whatever it is that we share 
works not only because we each have such loving and supportive partners at home, but because 
we are such busy people that being secondary forces in one another's lives may be better than 
bankrupting ourselves of time and money and energy trying to see one another as frequently as 
we'd like.  I don't know how people handled distances before the internet.


When work's excuse to fly out and visit was delayed one week, then another, and another, and 
then at least four months until spring, we had put too much hope and effort into the trip to 
keep waiting. I missed her. And while I'd met them before, this would be my first chance to 
visit her family on their own turf and be a part of their everyday life.