reading

One of the things about far away mothers coming for a visit is that all sorts of old family friends want to see her, and you end up spending your days balancing these social obligations with your childish desire to have her all to your self.

I was feeling a little churlish, to be honest, about having to go to the Cronens' apartment for lunch this past Sunday afternoon, the day before Mom was flying back to Seattle.

We arrived at their apartment just past 1:30 and a long-haired woman answered the door, propping up a baby on her hip. She looked familiar, very familiar, but I hadn't realized that she would be there so it took me a moment to be sure of her. Rachel, who immediately pointed out that in fact the last time we saw each other was more than a decade ago. April 25th, 1993, to be exact, the afternoon of my father's memorial service down at the lake where we spent so much of our childhood.

She's grown up a little since then. I guess maybe I have to.

She's all grown up now but she's still got that Rachel spark, that intensity, that willingness to crawl over tables to settle in next to you and talk and talk and talk about what ever strikes her fancy, or yours.

And she's got these two beautiful, tow-headed daughters now, six and three, who clearly reminded her of us. At one point Julie, the elder, was reading aloud from a book of fairy tales to Rory, the younger, and Rachel looked across the table at me with this gleam in her eyes and whispered, "Emily, look -- they're reading together..." and I had completely forgotten until that moment that one of the mainstays of my friendship with these beautiful little girls' mother was reading. Just reading.

We spent hours together, she and I, perched on the steps of her front porch, lying in the grass, sprawled in the dust of the attic, on the dock down at the lake, shoulder to shoulder, each of us entranced by our own book but inhabiting this space together, sunshine filtered through our blond hair and falling across our faces, sharing an experience of literature that I, at least, have never felt with anyone else.

I had forgotten how much this meant to me, this shared realm of language and silence. And I was moved by the fact that it clearly meant a lot to her too, the rarity of this friendship when we were little girls, as she looked affectionately at her daughters, heads bent towards each other over their book of fairy tales, and explained that she had never found another friendship quite like that.

I find myself amazed by the experiences that we forget as we grow older, grow further and further away from these clear, simple moments, and I am grateful to Rachel for reminding me of this, and I am wondering if I might not be able to find a space like that again.