It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
John Leonard
hazelnuts
N. and I met at university when we were in our 20s and soon became friends. N. and I are about as different as two women can be: I grew up in small-town Michigan and she grew up in Tokyo; she is Japanese and I am American; she loves experimental movies and literature; I love Tolstoy and large sprawling movies with a plot. We both love photography, however, the Sunday New York Times and good bookstores.
This weekend my husband I drove down from Vancouver to the cabin that N. and her husband A. own in a wooded area near Mt. Baker. We stayed a little over 24 hours - a much-needed break from the stresses of our day-to-day lives. We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner together, met their beautiful new dog, Morgan, caught up on each other's lives, and watched a documentary, Brasileirinho, about choro, a Brazilian musical genre that is a mix of jazz, overlaid with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, with a touch of melancholy thrown in for good measure. I'd never heard of choro, but I agreed that it is music worth loving.
We arrived at N.'s in the afternoon, not long before sunset. On Sunday morning, I had more light to explore the house. I admired the view out the front window of a large hazelnut tree and N. told me that there were several other hazelnut trees on their property. A huge stump - probably of a Douglas fir - could be seen from the window of our bedroom and I imagined what the property must have been like before it was logged. I found the wild turkey feather that N. had found on my father-in-law's land more than 20 years before, sitting in a place of honor on a niche in the living room. I wasn't surprised that she still had it because N. was always a person to be attracted to the flotsam and jetsam of the natural world and to hold onto the treasures she found. A Steller's jay feather and a small hawk feather sat on the same shelf. Together, these ephemeral objects told me that N. was still - at heart - the same woman I met so many years ago.
Steller's jay (below)
Later that afternoon, when it was time to go, we stood talking by the front door looking out at the hazelnut tree. I was surprised to see that the tree already had catkins on it. It blooms in February, N. told us, yellow blooms that are a welcome break from winter darkness. Earlier in the fall, N. said, the Steller's jays fly back and forth between the hazelnut trees gathering hazelnuts and the air resounds with their calls. As I write this, I love to think about N. looking out the window at the hazelnut blossoms in the spring and enjoying the color and clamor of the jays in the fall. I also smile about her ambition to learn to speak Brazilian Portuguese well enough to travel to Rio and listen to choro in its native habitat.
I expect we'll be back to the cabin someday, but it's hard to say when. It had been more than five years since our last visit. My husband and I had been busy with our growing son, our dying cat, aging parents, health issues and more. N. and her husband were busy with a dying dog, financial worries, and N.'s own health problems. That's the great thing about old friends, even when time passes, as long as you stay in touch, it isn't difficult to pick up the thread of each other's lives. Such rooted friendships provide solace for the losses that often come with growing older.
