meeting Mackenzie

Okay, guys. Something really cool happened to me yesterday. Like, insanely-not-even-real cool. Like, this-stuff-only-happens-in-really-cliché-books-because-real-life-is-not-this-perfect cool.

I went to a homeschool conference yesterday.

Which wasn't the cool part. But it was the reason the cool part happened.

 

I guess it's kind of crazy - no, wait. It's totally crazy. The whole thing is crazy. It all started so small...just a writing curriculum. Just an OYAN forum. Nobody meets real friends online; the very idea is silly. Laughable.

Right?

 

Okay, I'm done being cryptic. I'll just tell my story the boring way. Not that anything about this story is boring. At least not to me...

 

So, if you've hung around Epiphanies for any length of time, you'll know that when I was in eighth grade, I did a really awesome writing program called the One Year Adventure Novel. (the same writing curriculum linked above.) And a lot of you know that I found an amazing community on the OYAN forum.

I got to know several people in particular - one of them named Mackenzie Rose. I'm not really sure why we started talking...there are lots of people on OYAN, and we could have just as easily never connected.

 

Maybe it was the fact that we were two Canadians in a sea of American writers.

Maybe it was our shared love of the Amazing Race.

Maybe it was the prayer request topic she responded to.

Maybe it was a combination of all three?

 

 

For whatever reason, we clicked. We stayed in touch online (mostly using Skype - I heart Skype. Seriously.) And it was somewhere around last August that we began to contemplate the idea of meeting in person - after all, we didn't live that far apart. But three hours is far enough, and we just couldn't make it happen, so for a while the idea sort of dropped.

 

And then someone brought up the homeschool conference where Mackenzie's family sells OYAN. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

And that's where I was yesterday! At a homeschool conference with a completely awesome person and her sister. If I had to sum up the afternoon in one word, it would be laughter. We laughed through everything - selling OYAN and telling people "this is how we met!", playing improv games at one of the workshops, poking each other every time someone I knew walked by. (I honestly knew so many people...it seemed like every time someone walked by I'd nudge her and go "hey, I know that lady, too!")

 

And when the day was not-quite done and we'd almost lost our way several times, walked into a wall or two, and been embarrassingly incapable of locating food for lunchtime...then we sat outside on the grass with Kenzie's younger sister and talked, the three of us. And laughed, of course...and had grass fights and punctuated our sentences by tossing grass into the air. (okay, that was me. I didn't even know I was doing it until they started laughing.)

 

And we braided dandylions together and wore them like crowns, which drew a few stares and several comments...but we didn't care. (I'm actually so thrilled at having finally figured out how to make flower chains. I could never figure it out when I was younger.)

 

But wow. It was just pretty awesome. And I was honestly scared to death - afraid it'd be awkward, or we wouldn't have anything to talk about, or that for some reason we'd just hate each other. Yeah. I'm obviously a bit of an over-thinker...but it was so good. So much better than I expected (and aside from all of the worrying, I expected quite a lot.)

 

And one of these days I'm going to figure out a coordinated and not-abrupt way to end these posts.

 

tomorrow...

...is my 16th birthday!

...is the 2 hour finale of the Amazing Race, which Kenzie and I will hopefully Skype about later this week

...is "a new day with no mistakes in it yet."