The joy of friends and memory. New England. The sorrows of parting.

I just returned from a trip to New England, where I slept in a house set among the most gorgeous trees.

We were 'out of service'. No internet. No phone. We hiked and walked, kayaked and cooked. Together, with my parents, we celebrated the life of one of their best friends, my Uncle John, whose ashes flew away from the top of the great Mount Snow, and, at its slope, in his memory, I remembered my own childhood visits to Vermont.

My black diamond triumph. The smoky wooden smell of his cabin, sleeping with my feet tucked beneath its slanting roof. Candlepin bowling, a small and delicate sport, the way dollhouses are to a child, there's something small like me. The glittering hill where we used to sled, now overgrown with brush.

We visited friends and family across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, each one planting a kiss on Little O's forehead. We sat on the dock of Rust Pond and stories I have grown to love became vivid scenes as I saw for myself where my husband spent weeks of summer as a child.

I met the children of two of my best friends, all born within months of my own son, a beautiful trio spread out across a blue blanket, in purple and flowers and stripes and polkadots, feet in hands, smiles ripe and ready, eyes wide to the world.

Every child Little O meets is labelled a friend. 

This is your friend Nora, Rosie, Meghan, Augie, Brooks, Addison. On and on. This list of new friends.

And so it was with a strange mix of joy and sadness, I drove away. What a beautiful thing, to ride a long yellow line from one person to the next, to be fortunate enough to have so many people to see and hug. What a terrible thing to physically separate from a string of names. A long, winding river reel of the people I love.

Thinking About Friendship

Today (and always) I am grateful for my friends because, in recent weeks, I have discovered how difficult it is to make new ones. I have felt like a child, walking into the new mom groups or the classes and even the email feeds, feeling, as I have always felt: that I never quite belong. And I remember that my awkward, stammering conversation, my melancholy, my rambles, my long silences, my way of feeling so frantic or uncertain I forget to think, my words a runaway tumbleweed, are things that old friends, good friends, still tolerate.

I write this, not to be coddled, only to be honest, and to remind myself how lucky I am.

A lot of my friendships are founded on the basis of the yes, yes, oh! me too! exclamations. But some, and these are not any lesser, I treasure because we think in a pattern of opposites. I admire all my friends. There are pieces of them I wish I could steal for myself. Someday, I think, I'll make a new patchwork me, out of them, all stitched and sewn.

I have felt, in these past few weeks, that friendships of proximity no longer satisfy me. It is not enough to live nearby, to be close in age, to come from the same place or stand beside one another in the same stage of life. There is something greater at work. An understanding.

I hate small talk. And introductions. I hate what do you do where do you live where do you come from and, yet, I don't know any other way to begin.

I hope I am stumbling towards the people who become friends because one of us has followed a wild, meandering line to the other.

I hope you and I and all of us smack into each other when we are not looking.