Owl Vision 2018: Time to Remember
by Mary Drake –
Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I can’t imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry
Chicago
I got the news of Diane’s death several weeks after the fact. Aside from the annual Christmas card, we hadn’t been in touch for many years, so when her daughter called to let me know of her passing, it was a shock. Diane had been eight years younger than me and had died of lung cancer, although she hadn’t smoked a day in her life.
The sadness I felt was mixed with loneliness, too, at the thought of losing another friend, but I was also grateful for the good times we had shared. When I was a young mother, Diane and I had lived on the same block; every morning I would bundle my little David into his winter coat and hat and mittens, strap him in his stroller and head up the street to Diane’s. She was always in the kitchen (aren’t backdoor friends the best?) cleaning away the breakfast dishes and brewing us a fresh pot of coffee. Her little Leon would come running into the kitchen, leaving the morning cartoons he watched in his ‘jammies’ and wanting to play with David. Even though they were two years apart in age, the boys got along together, perhaps because of that age difference. After I took off my winter coat, Diane and I would sit around her Formica kitchen table, sip our coffee, usually with a sweet roll or slice of coffee cake, and discuss what we were doing that day, grocery shopping always being high on the list. We talked about whether our older children had cub scouts, soccer, or science club after school, and how our husband’s jobs were going, who was getting promoted, who might be transferred. It felt good to share the trials of motherhood–thoughts on how to deal with a two-year-old’s tantrum or what to do to get our kids to eat vegetables. Our friendship fit us both as comfortably as a well worn slipper.
When a year later Diane’s husband was transferred to a job in another state, we made our tearful goodbyes and promised to stay in touch, which we did for a while. But then my family also moved, and the distance and the years seemed to accumulate like dust on furniture.
I thought of her occasionally, when I sat down for a cup of coffee, or when my grandchildren ran around the house in their footed ‘jammies while watching cartoons. But I was never much of a letter writer and Diane didn’t like talking on the phone. I was grateful to find her years later when my granddaughter helped me get on Facebook. Like me, Diane now had grandchildren and she looked much the same as I remembered, only thinner and her hair had gone grey.
I muse about how quickly the years go by, and now that Diane is gone, I think that our shared memories are kind of frozen in time, like figures in a snow globe that I can always go back to look at, remember, and smile.