The same Saturday · 2:38 PM
The garden and pool, in absolute glory
We are well past lemonade. We have arrived at lemonade sparklers. The afternoon is doing exactly what I hoped it would.
Friends and friends of friends and possible friends that might become more than friends - counting my unexpected addition — arranged across the garden in the specific geometry of a party that has found its rhythm. Two deep in conversation under the old tree. Three gathered around the long table, ostensibly discussing something practical, actually discussing everything else. One doing a slow orbit of the peonies with an expression of pure covetousness, which I completely understand and intend to encourage. Several in the pool.
And the unexpected guest — I have been watching, because I am a person who pays attention — has done exactly what I suspected they would. Made their way into every conversation as if they had been coming to this particular spring pool party for years. Asked the right questions. Laughed at the right moments. Remembered names immediately, which is either a gift, a skill or a curse but either way is impressive.
I have refilled their glass twice. But only looked deeply at the new crinkles around the eyes once. The afternoon is young and I am keeping notes.
· · ·
At some point in the early afternoon — before the sparklers, before the conversation went sideways in the very best way — I found myself sitting beside the one I almost lost.
I don’t talk about this often. But you’re in my space now, Darlings, and this journal has a commitment to truth.
There was a period — several years ago now, long enough to have perspective but recent enough to still feel the shape of it — when this friendship went quiet. Not with drama. That’s the thing nobody tells you about losing a close friend: it’s rarely loud. It’s a series of slightly shorter messages. Slightly longer gaps between calls. Plans made and gently postponed and made again and then simply not made. The drift that happens when life pulls you each towards different coastlines and neither of you quite says so out loud.
It went on long enough that I began to grieve it privately. To file it in the part of myself that holds things I’m not ready to examine. I wore that loss the way you wear something uncomfortable that you’ve simply decided to live with — until one day I didn’t.
The call that changed it was not remarkable, in the way that truly important things often aren’t. Just a voice I’d missed saying my name like it always had. An apology from us both in the same breath. A long pause in which we both understood that some things are bigger than whatever small divergence had let so much time go by.
Today they arrived first. Before anyone else, before the peonies had finished opening, they walked through my garden gate in a gorgeous floral that was so exactly them it made me laugh, and we stood in the middle of the garden holding our lemonades and saying nothing for a moment because some reunions are too large for small talk and too warm for ceremony.
“You never called the garden anything,” they said, looking around. “It needs a name.”
“It’s a garden, with a pool.” I said. “Such spaces don’t need names.”
They gave me a look. The look that means they remember exactly who I am and are delighted by it. The look that only the oldest friends can pull off without it being a challenge.
“Everything you own has a name,” they said. “And a story. And probably a dedicated shelf.”
They were not wrong. We clinked glasses. The garden unnamed, the afternoon already underway. Some things do not need tidying up. Perhaps to be tied with a ribbon. But that is for a later entry I suspect.
· · ·
By mid-afternoon the party has taken on its own life entirely and I have done very little to manage it, which is, I believe, the highest form of hostessing. The table has become a place where conversations begin and end and begin again on entirely new topics. The peonies are being photographed. My lemonade recipe has been requested by four separate people and I have given four slightly different versions of it, all of them true from what I remember.
Someone has kicked off their shoes. Someone else is reading aloud from something on their phone and the laughter is the particular laughter of women who are not performing enjoyment but actually feeling it, right down to the glass in the hand and the sun on the shoulder and the afternoon that stretches open like a good sentence with no particular hurry to end.
My basket of extra sunglasses (large, bold frames) and wide brim hats is a revolving door of options being taken advantage of by (almost) everyone.
The unexpected guest has gravitated, gradually and without appearing to try, to the corner of the garden closest to where I am standing. We have now had four separate exchanges, each one slightly longer than the last. The most recent one ended with a question I am still turning over — not because it was difficult, but because it was the kind of question that assumes you are interesting, which is different from the questions that hope you might be.
I am making a note of it. In the diary. Right now. Which is not something they know, and which would probably please them if they did.
The sparkling lemonade has been opened. The afternoon has made its decision to stay a while. I think we should let it.
