I've been chatting online with a woman I met in a homeschool forum 8 years ago.  For 8 years we've been discussing our lives, our experience as mothers, and our struggles to figure out the homeschool thang.

This week her job brought her to my town.  So we got to meet in person.  Which has been an unexpectedly lovely wonderful and easy experience.  Well, I expected her to be lovely and wonderful.  I already knew that.  I didn't expect the easy part.  Or that I would trust her effortlessly and naturally.  I am not one bit shy but am deeply introverted and comfortable with silence.  So I wasn't sure how our nice quiet key tapping friendship would translate into real.  I didn't know no translation is necessary.  Its all real.

If you've been talking to someone for 8 years, you know them.  (Unless one of you is intentionally false.)  What is happening here online is not something other than the real world.  Its a different portal into the real world.  And my over riding feeling as I sat next to my friend for the first time was a need to physically touch her.  I kept wanting to put my hand on her arm or maybe just one quick little brush against her cheek to make certain she's really really real.  The way you might test the sheen of an apricot or the fuzzy leaf of a plant you've never seen before.  Her voice, her style, her responses were all familiar.  Comfortingly familiar -- as any old friend.  But encountering her physical self was kind of like having a beautiful fairy from the inside of a snow globe wake, shake itself, and fly right out of that globe into my living room.  Bizarrely wonderful magic, as is real life.