As a Hattiesburg, Mississippi native that moved around to Tennessee and Arkansas before I finally came home, I used to say that I’d never be back in the town that shaped my upbringing. God laughed and said, “Here’s your husband, Brad, the man who created a wiki about Hattiesburg because he’s never left.” And Hattiesburg has become the center of my world once again, and this time, I’m not mad at it.

A few important things to know about me that I feel might explain a bit about my personality and temperament: I’m an eldest daughter of us three Gunnufsen sisters,  mother of two boys, an Enneagram Four, and a former English teacher and aspiring author who finally got her ADHD diagnosis at 37 and finally understood half her life in rose-colored retrospection.

I process things through Bravo TV, memes, hymns, and little pockets of solitude where I can geek out over storytelling and character arcs and recurring themes that I can piece together like Charlie Day trying to explain a conspiracy theory.

I’m a Southern gothic girlie, with a draw to the whimsical, fantastical, weird, and outlandish. Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and Zelda Fitzgerald would have been invited to the weirdest girls group chat to talk about the craft of writing and living life if that were an option in some alternate universe. Ernest Hemingway’s invite was lost in the mail because—oops—I didn’t send it.

Our mutual dislike of Hemingway is one of the ways I met my best friend Rachael. It almost always centered around literature before it delved into deeper waters, but we found so much common ground, I began to wonder if this is what was meant by a  kindred spirit, or a bosom companion. This notion was only reinforced by Rachael when we finally understood that like fictional friends Anne Shirley and Dinana Barry, we each felt that deep female kinship we both had been longing for our entire lives. The stuff we only read about in books.

So when Rachael and I had the grand idea to host a classic literature podcast together called Keep It Classic, it just made sense. We already loved to gab about books so we made it a thing. Rachael did all the tech and audio mixing and behind the scenes stuff. I did the organization and the promotion and graphic creation, and developing scripts so we wouldn’t ramble and make ourselves giggle for fifteen minutes. That was the first time I had completed a project that felt like the perfect meshing of my interests and gifts. And it was because Rachael hyped me up. She believed in me. In us. In our hot takes on our favorite classic reads that would resound with others like us.

Rachael used to say we were like missionaries to all the exhausted and overstimulated mamas out there. She had the easiest way of connecting to people and getting to know them. And I watched her pull people in so effortlessly and I was just proud and content to be in her orbit.

She texted me once:

Thank you for being so sweet to the strays I pick up. I oscillate between wanting to keep you all to myself and being like “we are a dynamic outreach team for lonely mamas.”kre a dynamite outreach team for lonely mom

And it was never done through preaching at anyone or detailing  how well we were crushing this motherhood thing ( we were certainly not!), but by befriending others, inviting them to stuff, and making sure nobody stayed on the outside of things.

We were kindred spirits, the Anne-and-Diana kind. 

But Rachael died. And rather than trying to keep her in a contained box that reads as past tense, I am realizing that Rachael would never have been one to stay contained, nor would I ever want her to. She lived loudly, boldly, and I refuse to let my grief bury her memory.

 So this blog is where I write her letters — ongoing, no deadline, no end date. It's also where I write about faith that doesn't tie up neatly, about raising boys to be whimsical, empathetic, and kind, about the books I love and the ones I'm writing myself, and about a hundred small, ordinary, sacred things in between.

So, consider this your invitation–into the Kindred Era.  Kindred Spirits are not so hard to find after all if we just keep looking, Anne Shirley tells us. And in keeping it classic, I’m owning this stage, too. If this feels like something your speed, then come on in.

You can be a hot mess. You can be overstimulated and under-rested. All y’all are welcome, you just gotta act right. Diet Coke is optional, but highly recommended.

That's what Rachael would have wanted.