The last time I saw my friend JoAnn was in the receiving line for her Mom’s wake. It was in late 2019, and the sadness and loss that characterized that occasion would linger well into 2020 and beyond, so reuniting with JoAnn carried special import. We’d been in touch via regular texts and a few Zoom meetings, along with the traditional letter (does anyone write letters anymore?) but there’s something about the human experience that demands the closeness and proximity of an in-person visit. Sometimes more can be said in simply sitting beside an old friend in silence than could ever be conveyed in words or letters or phone chats.
JoAnn’s room was accented by a single small vase of garden daisies, but she arrived with bushels of the kind of hydrangeas that only Cape Cod can produce – putting out pale blue and pink ‘Endless Summer’ variety to faded shame. These were the hydrangeas in her mother’s garden – the ones I had first seen so many decades ago on that brilliant summer day when she first introduced me to her family.
Andy once explained that the first time he felt himself healing just the slightest bit from his Mom’s death was when he started to remember her and instead of feeling profound sadness or grief, he felt a little smile start to form on his lips. I think JoAnn is almost there, but there will always be that hole, always be that little bit of grief that pops up when they want to share something with their Moms. We felt it without having to explain it, and that kind of shared humanity was sorely missed from the last year and a half. We tried to make up for it, and we did. It was enough just to be together.
Together also meant Ali’s joining in the festivities. Fast friends ever since we drove back to Boston in the middle of a snowstorm together, she’s also Andy’s special connection, and having everyone reunited in our home – the very first overnight guests since the nightmare of COVID stalled all our lives – brought a bit of happiness back.
The next morning, originally slated to be as rainy and messy as the night of their arrival, miraculously cleared for a few hours. The temperatures reached into the 80’s, and we spent the mid-morning in the pool, catching up and laughing and talking of everything and nothing at once.
Time passes much too quickly when old friends haven’t seen each other in a while. Maybe it was the isolation of COVID that made us value this visit a bit more, that caused us to lean into the quieter moments and not seek out the elusive high of hype and hoopla. Maybe after over a year of being apart we held a little tighter to each other now knowing what it was like to be apart for a long time. Simple being together was a gift.
And then there was this other gift, a surprise left by JoAnn that I discovered in the sad hours after their early Sunday departure. In such moments, when my girls have just left, and Andy is still asleep, I always feel a desire to weep a little, while at the same time my heart wants to burst from the happiness of the time we were lucky to have together. Lingering at the front door, I’ll watch as their car pulls away, then slowly step back into the living room. The world seems a little lonelier then.
On this morning, however, I walked into the bathroom and a sparkle in the cologne cabinet caught my eye. On the Tom Ford shelf was this surprise gift of ‘Lavender Extreme’ from JoAnn. My heart caught in my throat, and the touching generosity and goodness of a friend I’ve known and loved for over two decades washed over me, somehow letting me know that there were still such lovely people in this world.
We have plans to meet in the Cape and New Bedford this coming fall, if the world will be so kind enough as to allow it. In the meantime, we have a new stockpile of happy memories to see us through the remaining summer.
