To end a year of what I will admit is a ridiculous amount of moving around, we have arrived in St. Petersburg, FL for the winter. We’ll be here through April, and I’ll be back up north in May for when IT’S A LOVE STORY comes out. It is, incidentally, available for preorder.
Now that I’m on a first name basis with the manager of the Home Depot and am mostly settled, it’s time to get serious about finding my neighbors. The secret to having good neighbors is to be lucky. These are relationships you don’t pick – a million small, separately made decisions bring the two of you to the same street, the same floor, at the same moment in time. It’s a crapshoot, and over the years I have been exceptionally lucky. Kim with the evening dog runs and wine. Jeannie at my doorstep with a box of donut holes. Emilie quietly coaching me on motherhood. I find these relationships so sacred that once you’re my neighbor, you will always be my neighbor, no matter where you live. Someone recently asked if I knew Claudia Bell, and I said, “Yes, she’s my neighbor.” We lived across the hall from one another in 2001.
So now I’m down here, scanning the elevators for my people. Specifically, I’m looking for the borrowers. A borrower is someone who’s okay with being vulnerable. She’s not afraid to tell you that she got halfway through making cookies before she realized she was out of eggs. And eggs, being my love language, are my favorite things to lend. Take this smooth orb of nutritional perfection as a reward for owning up to your human frailty.
I am currently stocked with eggs, flour, and AA batteries, waiting for the knock.
LOL, as if. This week’s word count: zero.
But I did re-read the designed first pass pages of IT’S A LOVE STORY, maybe for the last time. Immediately after I finished that, it became available for request on NetGalley, and now PEOPLE ARE READING IT! I don’t know why I never see this part coming, especially since it’s the whole point, but I am never ready.
So far, people are liking it, and I am cautiously optimistic.
Sherry_reads_books on instagram wrote a particularly beautiful review and created these images which feel like they were pulled right out of my head. Here are some of her favorite quotes and a general aesthetic for the book:
That last photo is Sherry, to whom I say THANK YOU!
Okay, that’s all for now. Except there’s a dog park on our corner, again (what fresh hell, indeed) and I’m still sussing it out. Yesterday pup and I struck up a conversation with a nice man who was drinking a beer at two p.m. From what I can tell so far, there are no rules in Florida.
Anybody ever have a particularly wonderful neighbor? Warm my heart in the comments please.
More soon,
Annabel
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I hit the jackpot with my neighbor Maggie and have 5 years of stories to prove it. But the best might be when I had the flu and my husband was out of town and Maggie whisked away my kids, then 2 and 4, kept them all afternoon, gave them dinner, and returned them at bedtime happy, bathed and in borrowed pajamas.
We love Sherry!!
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