Em-bell-ishment

A few days ago, I visited my friend M. We go way back. Our relationship began with her original hospitality and it has grown since.  I like to see her regularly, in part because she's always up to new things: most recently, story books she wants to publish. Once a week she reads aloud to school children and this project grows out of that. She's got a story about a nay-sayer girl and another about a forgetful basset. She's collaborating with an illustrator who has made hilarious sketches of all the main characters. It's very exciting. But then M. is always thinking big, and that's one thing I like about her (though I'm sometimes wary). She's curious about this blog, for instance. 

This most recent occasion is just the latest in our long encounter which has evolved as we've both matured, she more than me. It hasn't always been easy because, though we're alike in many ways, we are very different in others. What we think works and how we should manage affairs, what can be trusted and what's outrageous: all of these have lead to disputes. We have history. 

I have to recognize her otherness, acknowledge her as my Other, and address her directly as 'You', which all the pleasure and trepidation that intimacy entails. M. is so completely herself: phenomenon as much as friend. As time passes, I feel it more urgent for us to spend time. There's much between us that's unsaid but that's part of the style of our encounter.

I loved walking the dogs with you around the wind-swept fields. You were so cold. I wished I could have wrapped you up and kept you warm. (I'd misled you, you claimed, about the temperature.) Tough, sassy, generous, obstinate, good-humored, brave (best wishes for that new knee), passionate...I could go on. But even as I write, I feel a tolling in my heart of something like a great bell representing our life-long connection. This is not a memoir, nor an anecdote, but an appreciation of richness, not perhaps the maximum conceivable (what might that be?) but something palpable, positive, resonant, life-giving.