Lemonade

I got the sweetest text today.

See, as a pre-teen and teenager, I loved physical activity. Actually, I still do.

So starting when I was about four, my sisters and I all went to dance classes and rode horses, but by junior high, it was sports.  We had a basketball hoop over our garage door (didn’t everyone?) and we played in the driveway.  We played soccer in the front yard.  We walked over the nearby elementary school and played pickup softball.  We swam.

In seventh grade, the options for team sports at my school were quite limited, so I (and a friend) joined the boys’ soccer team – soccer wasn’t my first choice, but my big sister played it and was awesome at it, so why not?

The summer before eighth grade, there was a basketball camp at the high school.

That summer…

Three girls went – of course, I was one of them – because we were getting a girls’ team!  I don’t remember anything odd about there only being three of us with the boys.  Maybe it was the coach.  Maybe it was the boys.  Maybe it was us.  Or maybe it was just our love of the game.

In eighth grade, and then ninth, I played on the girls’ team.  I wasn’t good, but I played.  And my knees objected.  So by the tenth grade, when we had a new coach (thank God, as we had gone 2 – 18 the previous year), I didn’t make the team.  I just couldn’t keep up anymore.

But I loved basketball.  I loved my friends.  So I became the scorer and kept stats for the team.  I felt like I was part of the team, even though, really, I was a hanger-on.  Or I thought so.  Until today.

Today, I heard from my oldest friend (we have known each other (ahem) fifty years now).  She was a star on that team.  She texted me from her daughter’s first game:  “seeing the girls at the table taking stats and keeping score and it makes me think of you! So I just wanted to say thank you for doing that and being part of the team!! Probably never said thank you back then so saying it now🤗thank you❤️”

So I realized… I wasn’t a hanger-on.  I was part of that team, even if they didn’t say so.  And I learned, for the first time though far from the last, that lemons can become lemonade, and a disappointment is not always an ending.