Green tiles red walls

Saturday night I was lucky enough to be invited to a dinner party. This gathering consisted of six women, two of whom I knew and three of whom I did not.

As I walked into the house and met Meredith, I immediately knew I had met her before. So we went through the litany of ways we could have bumped into each other; college, high school, parks, gym, neighborhoods, neighbors, new houses, church (since we don’t go, that was never going to fly), friends, work, husbands. We kept trying but kept coming up empty handed and all that even before I had downed my first drink.

The wine kept coming and I almost felt like a stalker in the room. I sat there and stared and stared at her. I couldn’t figure it out and now it was driving me crazy. The way she talked, her mannerisms, her daughter, it all seemed so familiar I knew I had spoken with her before.

At the dinner table the conversation turned to pregnancies. All the women present had children, fifteen amongst the six of us in fact and another due in less than a month. The pregnancy discussion went full circle and ended on bed rest stories. I was telling my tale of 10 weeks of bed rest with CT and how we had to move in with my in-laws because or cute little English Tudor house had only one bathroom and it was on the upper level with the bedrooms and I couldn’t take the stairs up and down to watch TV, make food, or go to the bathroom.

At that point in the story, Meredith says, “I know this is so random, but what color was the tile in your bathroom?”

“Green.”

“With red walls?”

“Yes.”

“AAAAhhhhhaaaaaaa, you were selling your house and I walked through it.”

Three years ago, when we put our house on the market, she and her husband and her daughter came to look at the house. My kids were sleeping, so I told the realtor that I would not wake my sleeping babies but they could come look and I would hang out in the back yard. And in the back yard Meredith and I had a lengthy conversation about the house and the neighborhood and kids.

How “random” is right. How small of a world we live in. How lucky that I got another chance to meet Meredith, she’s way cool…even though she didn’t buy my house.

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