How we love our lifelong friends! They know so much about us! They track our families, they offer sympathy when needed and light frivolity when we need that even more. But what are the chances that they will always live close by? In America -- small. How many of your best friends still live within a fifteen minute drive of your home? A pathetically small number, right? Perhaps zero?
Maintaining long distance friendships should be easy -- all that technology! And travel options! But the fact is, most of us are terrible at it and even though big ticket news items are indeed shared, it's the small stuff that falls by the wayside. And that's a shame, because as you and I know, it's in the small stuff that we most often find the most sacred moments.
Diane, my friend of law student days, arrived at the farmette today. I'm lucky. She is good about flying up to the farmette! (Well, to airports not too distant from the farmette.) My next 48 hours are going to be full of those minutes that you need to keep a friendship alive. So, once again, posts of few words, but surely not of few warm feelings.
First, though, the usual: a morning with cats and flowers.
This is the cat chaos that I face every morning. Enough to give you pause? Indeed! Especially when you realize that some of them may impregnate the others. Cats have no social prohibitions about mating with a sibling.
We take out our Have-a-Heart trap and call a vet to see if we can figure out how to get a bunch of these cats "fixed."
Flowers? Well, we're now in retreat mode: I snipped close to 800 lilies today. That's 200 fewer than yesterday. I feel like summer is coming to an end!
Breakfast.
Today's sweet stars..
And in the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop, who rushes over to tell Ed that he is very late in picking up Diane at the bus stop!
The little girl plays alone for nearly the whole time Diane and I start in on our catch up marathon. I sometimes think that kids are very reassured by the sound of adult voices, telling stories that they can half understand in the background.
In the evening, I make Aperitivi Rosati: lovely summery spritz drinks over which a discussion of life may begin!
And eventually, Ed joins us for a dinner out on the porch.
Predictably, it is a long long time before Diane and I leave that porch. Empty glasses in hand, we come inside only to continue our talk in the kitchen... then the living room... until neither one of us has any zip left. Tomorrow! We'll pick up again tomorrow.
Maintaining long distance friendships should be easy -- all that technology! And travel options! But the fact is, most of us are terrible at it and even though big ticket news items are indeed shared, it's the small stuff that falls by the wayside. And that's a shame, because as you and I know, it's in the small stuff that we most often find the most sacred moments.
Diane, my friend of law student days, arrived at the farmette today. I'm lucky. She is good about flying up to the farmette! (Well, to airports not too distant from the farmette.) My next 48 hours are going to be full of those minutes that you need to keep a friendship alive. So, once again, posts of few words, but surely not of few warm feelings.
First, though, the usual: a morning with cats and flowers.
This is the cat chaos that I face every morning. Enough to give you pause? Indeed! Especially when you realize that some of them may impregnate the others. Cats have no social prohibitions about mating with a sibling.
We take out our Have-a-Heart trap and call a vet to see if we can figure out how to get a bunch of these cats "fixed."
Flowers? Well, we're now in retreat mode: I snipped close to 800 lilies today. That's 200 fewer than yesterday. I feel like summer is coming to an end!
Breakfast.
Today's sweet stars..
And in the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop, who rushes over to tell Ed that he is very late in picking up Diane at the bus stop!
The little girl plays alone for nearly the whole time Diane and I start in on our catch up marathon. I sometimes think that kids are very reassured by the sound of adult voices, telling stories that they can half understand in the background.
In the evening, I make Aperitivi Rosati: lovely summery spritz drinks over which a discussion of life may begin!
And eventually, Ed joins us for a dinner out on the porch.
Predictably, it is a long long time before Diane and I leave that porch. Empty glasses in hand, we come inside only to continue our talk in the kitchen... then the living room... until neither one of us has any zip left. Tomorrow! We'll pick up again tomorrow.
