My friendship garden

 

These three are among the many friends I treasure

I didn’t do much work today. Instead, I spent much of the day emailing back and forth with friends, or, as I came to think of it, tending my friendship garden. I have long likened friendships to a garden—you have to work to maintain them. I know people who have few if any friends and people who have only their friends of the immediate moment but have lost contact with those from the past. I think that’s sad. I am blessed with friends from my childhood forward—many these days by email, but some still in person. But I work at it. And I think as I age, keeping my friendships alive and healthy becomes more and more important to me.

Today many of my emails had to do with the loss of a friend of fifty years or more. Bill Benge’s death put me in touch with friends from Colorado to New York City who wanted to know how to contact Sharon, when was the service, where should they send memorial donations. I think I said recently that my mom said one of the saddest parts of growing old was that your friends died all around you. That’s true, but I hadn’t thought through to the fact that a death puts you in touch with others who also held the deceased dear. I wouldn’t say it’s been a benefit, but it has helped to share the grief and the admiration for a life well lived.

But then there were also emails about the yard and work that needs to be done, my hearing aid which suddenly went dead, the menu for a guest who’s coming tomorrow night and insists that I have fed her enough and she will bring dinner—I have willingly agreed to that because I’m still a bit gob smacked and the menu I planned, an asparagus tart, suddenly sounded overwhelming. It was the kind of day when I had to stop and think, “Now who was I going to email next?”

A few professional emails worked their way in—one about an upcoming review of my new book, another to send off a guest post, and one in response to my newsletter which just went out yesterday. (Didn’t get yours? Just let me know at j.alter@tcu.edu and I’ll see that it gets in the mail.) And there were a couple of emails that tied to the TCU community.

All of this emailing was a welcome activity because I am, as I’ve said, between projects and faced with deciding what I’m going to work on next. Ideas for a new Irene are rattling in my brain but not solid enough for action yet, and there is always Helen Corbitt … but I keep procrastinating. Perhaps if I reread what I have, I’d regain my enthusiasm.

But I digress, because I really wanted to talk about friendship and communities. My webmaster who is profoundly deaf wrote me that she hopes to move from Long Island to Rochester, NY where there is a large deaf community. I asked if it is a close-knit community, and she said it is and she already has friends and connections there. And that got me to thinking about the various communities in which we all live.

These days I think mine are the mystery writing community and my church community plus maybe the close-knit neighborhood I live in is a community. When I was younger, the world of osteopathic medicine was also a community for me. When my husband and I first traveled, in so many U.S. cities there was usually a D.O. who I had known as child, several of whom I called uncle. And then for thirty years, there was the TCU community where I spent some of the happies—and some of the most difficult—years of my career. Facebook is a critter of a different nature and yet, a community of its own. I find I have many Facebook friends that I have met online, never met in person and probably never will. But they are important to me.

Communities, I am convinced, shape our lives, but they are not mutually exclusive—a mistaken notion held by many. It is possible to move easily between communities and, as we age, to move from one to another. For instance, my mystery writing and Facebook communities have lots of overlap. But my point about friendship is that you can still maintain contact with some from a community that is no longer a part of your life. That is the case for me and the osteopathic community and, in many ways, for the TCU community. Life brings change, and change usually is growth—but you don’t have to leave behind the people you have treasured.

I may have been wandering in a field of words here, but I think what I’m trying to say is that as we move through life—for me from childhood to golden years—we meet a lot of people, many of whom will pass out of our lives. Their part in our story is done. But there are some in each community or group or aspect of our lives, that we treasure and keep with us as friends. Those friendships don’t automatically survive without attention. You have to tend to your friendship garden.

In an apropos metaphor, I plan to go nursery shopping this week to tend to my springtime garden. A different kind of garden but also important.