My friends “Trixie” and “Loretta” are moving stuff around my house. One grabs a chair and scoots it towards my fireplace. The other grabs a lamp and places it on the piano. They are decorators who in the loving friendship of divorce have offered to give my home a makeover.

Loretta scopes the room as she ‘mind shops’ my existing belongings. She perches each in a new found home within my home. Each time I feel a spring in my step. No, scratch that. I feel the laser precision of an awesome internal face lift.

In between the shuffle we alternate laughing and solving the worlds (at least my divorce worlds problems).

“I turned off life last night,” says Loretta.

Trixie laughs.

“You can do that?” I inquire. “Cuz, I wanna, no I need to do that right now.”

We all laugh.

“I can’t believe you are doing this for me,” I say. “This is one of the biggest things that has ever been done for me.”

“That’s because you’re a wound licker,” says Loretta. “The chickens all line up to get their wounds licked from the wound licker. You need your own wounds licked now.”

Trixie nods. I take everything in. The kindness of friendship. I start to tell them that I have been writing notes for a column on thanking all the wonderful friends who have helped me through divorce.

“Someone once told me to think of friendship as a stable,” says Trixie. “We need all kinds of different friends in our stable throughout life.”

Loretta swipes paint with soothing brush strokes across my weathered mahogany dining room table. The victim of a girl’s Christmas party gone bad with a catered food sterno fire. Loretta sands down the one wound of my table. She then sweeps Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Coco, across the entire surface. It dries and then she distresses it and waxes it.

Suddenly, what is old is new again. What is old is more beautiful than it was. There is hope welling. If not for this old chick at least for anything and everything that I can slather with this flipping amazing chalk paint.

I get choked up and hug them. I am happy that my stable houses these two friends. I am also grateful that they too are fellow wound lickers. And that somehow they let me knock the other chickens out of the barn to be first today in their friendship, wound licking line.

Oh, and you owe it to yourself divorce or no divorce to check out Chalk Paint.

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