A heck of a difference.

It’s not that hotels don’t have their charm. I certainly don’t mind a good continental breakfast, especially if it holds the added lure of a waffle maker, one of the few things that might actually drag me out of bed during the part of day that is still classified as morning. But hotels can get old. The paper thin walls. The roommates that you hope don’t snore. The maids that are constantly trying to barge in, though I realize that “barging in” is just part of their job description.

Anyway, this past week I have had the luxury of staying in a real, honest to goodness home here in Calgary. A friend’s mom has been kind enough to open her house to a few of us, even offering us our own keys and bedrooms, respectively.

Wow.

So we had just a few people over for a real dinner last night.

John Legend was singing in the background and when he got tired Nickel Creek jumped right in; and all the while we were busy in the kitchen. My dear friend Ian, who is a master chef in his own right, had already prepared some spaghetti and delicious sauce the night before, and Emily had baked a cake while I had made some frosting. We also made sure we had everything we needed for salad, garlic bread, and of course, wine.

Well, I guess the only thing you need to make sure you have in order to have wine is wine–and actually, our guests supplied that.

But here we are. Stirring, icing, warming, buttering, pouring. Taking advantage of this beautiful kitchen, wearing no shoes and not thinking a thing about audiences or leotards or God I hope I get it.

It was dinner among friends.
With everyone chipping in.

And every beautiful cake needs a garnish, right?

So I might have taken a little spider from the halloween decorations currently gracing my dressing room.
He might have happily sat on top of our cake.

Our hummingbird cake.*

*no hummingbirds were harmed in the making of this cake.

And what a delicious three tiered beauty it turned out to be.
But more than anything else, the feeling of family, of community, was maybe the sweetest thing of the night.

She now knows how to say, An adult woman is swimming, which will be a perfect conversation starter at the stage door, I am sure.

I mean, really, there’s got to be an adult woman swimming somewhere in the world at that moment, even if it isn’t exactly pertinent to the situation at hand.

I am feeling content with my thorough knowledge of the word, konichiwa.

That means hello, as you probably already know.

I plan on saying that a lot.

And when they ask me if I’ve had Japanese lessons, I will simply and modestly say no–self-taught, actually. And then I will take a sniff and mention something about how languages are just intuitive with some people.

As is the need to rise to a challenge.

To scale any wall.

And I don’t mean that metaphorically, at least not tonight.

See, three of us are walking home tonight and on a whim decide to take the river walk to get there. It’s just lovely here and who doesn’t want to see the moon reflecting on the water as much as possible?

That’s what I thought.

Anyway, we start on the river walk and much to our chagrin see that it has been closed off with a chain link fence, due to some sort of construction or other such nonsense.

We probably would have just taken the two block detour and veered away from the river walk had it not been for the two heckling men that were sitting by the chain link fence.

River walk’s closed, ladies, the one guy seems only too happy to report to us.

Yep, you’re gonna have to go around, guy number two says, I mean, whatcha gonna do–scale that fence in those pretty dresses?

And with that they both share an extremely long and generous laugh at what, to them, must seem like the most preposterous and ridiculous idea ever swapped between two men in the history of manly idea swapping.

And I am pretty sure there have been a fair share of ridiculous ideas swapped.

Just saying.

We don’t need to say anything, really, their laugh having sealed the deal.

With resolution in our steps, we walk up those stairs and right up to the chain link fence. Like a good team, we work together.

Deanna stands directly behind me, blocking the men’s view, should my dress lift a little too much as I am the first to scale the fence. With the river on my right and chain link on my left, I loop a leg over the fence. As I swing my body over it I glimpse one of the guys in the peanut gallery with his camera poised at me.

Perfect.

Hopefully he has a blog.

We pass bags for each other to hold and link arms as, one after the other, all three of us safely make it across.

We are Superwoman, Madeline Albright, and Rosa Parks all at once.

We take a few paces feeling quite proud of ourselves, laughing and savoring the moment as we leave those hecklers behind when suddenly we come upon an even bigger chain link fence.

Turning back is not an option.

Not with Thing 1 and Thing 2 back there; not with their camera and not with their laughter.

Again, we walk up to it, determined to make this thing work.

Thank God we are dancers. There is a hole, a tiny space between the chain link fence and the railing and one by one, we shimmy through, passing bags and grabbing hands.

We come through as women victorious. We wear dresses and climb fences.

And oh yeah, we get our periods.

Which is why I sent this text to my friend Emily today:

After a few moments, I hadn’t gotten any texts back from her, which surprised me a little.

Finally my phone lit up with a text and I looked down to see this from Amos: