still clique-less and in the margins I stand

Yesterday, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wrote about my love for the Devon Horse Show, how this ten-day event resonated with me as a child and brought me here as a woman in search of a home some two decades ago.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that I spent much of yesterday on my own street corner, watching the carriages go by with my father, and, later, walking the fairgrounds with my husband. Going in and out of stables, sipping a smoothie, watching.

Watching.

It may just be that writer thing. Or maybe it's in my blood. But yesterday, like most days, the parties were going on without me—the annual, tented neighborhood gathering a half block away, the swirls of friends at the lemon-stick stand on the Midway, the backyard barbeques. I've always been the girl who stars in my quasi-autobiographical young adult novel, Undercover—behind the scenes and reliably helpful, called on in a crisis, quietly off the list most other times.

I am a person with so many, many friends—individual, one on one, personal, often invisible. I am also a person without an established community. I think about things like this on holidays. And I am grateful, always, for the horses, and for those who served our country, who stood behind the idea of community.