Underneath my unfamiliar hair style, behind her new horn-rims, we reconnect as if one of us has only left the room, then returned to pick up the conversation with "and then..."
Our families lived beside the same river, on the land and of it, long enough to help fill up a country cemetery. Somewhere there's a picture of us taken at my seventh birthday party; we’re blowing paper horns and wearing dunce caps we made out of glitter and tin foil. We are having a fine old time in our starched organdy dresses and patent leather Mary Janes. We were innocents, believing that, like our parents’ lives, our proximity and friendship would stretch out forever.
The next year, I moved away.
But place, like DNA, is imprinted on us; the forks of the river never let go of me. Three decades later, instinct led me down a gravel road in a rental car to park in front of a white wedding cake of a house. When I got out, droopy-headed sunflowers in final fling made me sneeze; before I could knock, my friend had opened the front door. When I fell into her open arms, I was home again.
Now, like the migrating geese gleaning her cornfields before the long winter, I, too, swing by in autumn on my way from here to there. No matter how much time I can spare, it’s never enough. We start talking at the baggage carousel and don’t stop until I walk through the departure gate.
Our reunion routine never varies: talk, hug, laugh, cry, laugh some more, share, compare, I sleep sleep sleep, she cooks, cooks, cooks, laugh, cry, laugh some more, hug, part.
Much of this occurs during pilgrimages: my grandmother's house where the concrete birdbath is decorated with my blue marbles; the river bottom where the Big Flood ruined our last crop and sent us packing to the Big City; the once-jumpin' supper club where our parents danced until dawn while we slept in a spare booth, rolled-up overcoats and velvet stoles forming our makeshift corral.
On this visit, we realize we are on the paths we'll walk to the end. We talk freely, for the first time, about roads not taken.
I look around at my friend's new "dream" house filled with her mother's antiques. There are endless views of waving prairie grass, a pond stocked with fish, a dock where she dangles her feet. Bookshelves overflow with photos of family milestones.
My friend’s home is only 15 miles from that old wedding cake farmhouse where she and her high school sweetheart raised their kids, harvested million-dollar corn crops in heyday years, went broke in one bad one. My friend has spent her whole life looking at a big sky in a small space, knowing exactly where she belongs.
I am a gypsy, always looking for whatever’s over the horizon, never staying long enough to grow up a tree to shade. I chose the fast track but, like my friend, I, too, lost my financial footing in middle age and have been trying to regain my balance ever since.
She has children and grandchildren; I couldn’t. My furniture was picked up willy-nilly from the arctic to the tropics; none of it matches, none of it is old or fine. I left my high school sweetheart at the prom, didn't marry until I was 31. As my friend settles into retirement, I work at reinventing myself to stay in a disappearing profession.
"What if...?" my friend wonders, echoing my thoughts.
It is a rhetorical question. But on a perfect autumn day, with someone I’ve known as long as myself, it’s dangerous to think the grass might be greener in her pasture. So I tell her that Abraham Lincoln got it right: people get what they want.
Given the chance, neither of us would trade places.
It’s only the best of friends who can probe and poke at each other's soft spots. As our ancestors used to say, we know where all the bodies are buried. Our families are entwined like a double helix, Kentuckians who pioneered through the Cumberland Gap on horseback and in wagons, following a trail blazed by Daniel Boone, arriving at the forks of the river and proclaiming: “Here!.”
We share similar stories, handed down from then to now like mended quilts. We know whose forbears drank too much, ran off with somebody else's wife, gambled away the family fortune, lost a son in the war. All the wars.
My friend and I speak with the same accent, say Missour-UH instead of Missour-EE, understand the same colloquialisms, laugh at the same jokes. No matter how far apart we get, we are nourished by the same tap root.
Reunited with my friend, I am humming the 19th century Shaker hymn:
'Tis a gift to be simple,
'Tis a gift to be free,
'Tis a gift to come down
Where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves
In the place that's right
'Twill be in the valley
Of love and delight.
