I have written a lot about friendships, about those few fertile times in my life that I’ve made special ones, about how few true native speakers I’ve met, about the immense value I place on my female friends.  I was with one of those native speakers this weekend, and I can’t fully articulate the joy, ease, and sheer grace of being in her presence.

Q is unquestionably one of the people I love most dearly in the entire world.  She is one of my first child’s godmothers.  She is also a redhead with brown eyes, a combination I didn’t realize was unusual until I was an adult.  We don’t see each other enough, but when we do we slip immediately back into shorthand.  I think her husband is wonderful and she and Matt have private jokes of their own.  She gets all of my references.  She gets me.

I met Q 19 years ago, on a hot early-fall afternoon in Princeton.  She is everything I want to be, myself.  She is smart, funny, loving, honest, occasionally clumsy and frankly beautiful.  We share a commonality of both history and outlook that is unique in my life.  She has the rare position, shared by a few, of having both witnessed and deeply impacted my becoming who I am now.

We are peers and have moved through the stages of life largely in tandem.  Some of our choices have been different but our essential values are near-identical.  It was next to Q that I ran out Princeton’s FitzRandolph gate for the first time (legend holds that you cannot exit this gate until the day of your graduation, which is the day we did so).  She was one of the first people I called when I got my heart broken, got into business school, got engaged, got pregnant.  She wore blue as my bridesmaid and I wore coral as hers.  We’ve talked about wrinkles and mortgages and crock pots and the delights and fears that populate our every single day as mothers.

Together we rode a ferris wheel on Saturday afternoon.  High over Chicago, in a crystal-clear, cold blue sky.  With our first-born children sitting, together, across from us.  Up, up, up into the cloudless blue.  Knocked around a little by the wind.  Sitting next to each other we gazed around, laughing, wide-eyed.  And then we rode slowly down down, completing the arc set in motion so many years ago.

I can’t think of many people I’m more grateful to have next to me on this ride.

I love you, Q.  Thank you.

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The American Cancer Society believes that every birthday is a victory – another year that cancer has not won. Thanks in part to the Society’s cutting-edge scientific research, patient support, and prevention, education, and advocacy efforts, 11 million cancer survivors will celebrate another birthday this year.

Tiny Prints, the online stationary boutique, is fighting for more birthdays with an exclusive card collection on TinyPrints.com that is inspired by all of the ways the American Cancer Society saves lives.

From now until April 30, 2012, the Tiny Prints more birthdays card collection will be available here.  I love the cards, and in particular two.  These remind me of people I love whose lives have been touched by cancer.

Jessica is one of my very dearest friends, a true sister of the spirit and in the ways that matter.  We’ve known each other for most of our lives, and saw a day we’d both dreamed of come true in July when our daughters became bunk mates at the same camp where we met so many years ago.  Jessica’s family has been profoundly and irrevocably altered by cancer.  For some reason this card reminds me of her; like the image, she is composed of a million brilliantly-colored, uniquely-shaped layers which, together, create a beautiful whole.

The card reminds me of the famous Elisabeth Kubler-Ross quotation: “People are like stained-glass windows.  They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”  There’s nobody in my life who more surely embodies true beauty than Jessica, and I say this without reservation.  She manages to live with tremendous uncertainty and in the shadow of substantial loss, and she does so with joy, love, and passion.  Every single day.  In many ways, Jess is my hero.

I’m fortunate beyond words to have her in my life, and I hope fiercely to share another 60 years with her, to watch our girls grow up and have children of their own.  It is one of my devoutest wishes that Jess and I are able to keep up what has become a lifetime conversation about life and about books, about identity and about the sea, about love and about sorrow.  This conversation, this relationship, is a central cord that runs through my life and sometimes feels like one of the only things that anchors me to who I am and to what matters.

My maternal grandmother, Priscilla (Nana to me) died at the age of 78 of pancreatic cancer.    Nana was youthful and healthy when she was diagnosed, out of the blue, with pancreatic cancer.  Her battle was valiant but losing; she died six months to the day after her diagnosis.  This card reminds me of Nana and Ba’s house in Providence, the location of so many important childhood memories.  At Christmas they always put a single (electric) candle in each window of their house, so the glowing squares remind me of arriving to see them, tires squeaking on the gravel driveway, on dark December evenings.  Nana’s home was elegant and comfortable at the same time, and Hilary and I spent many happy weekends and weeks staying there during school breaks.  The card above represents home – and hope – powerfully for me, and there are few places I was more at home and hopeful than Nana’s house.

I wish, often, that Nana was here to know my children.  In particular Grace has certain facial expressions that can bring Nana to mind for me, and a similar tall, rangy stature and dark hair.  Nana was a talented athlete, graceful and coordinated, as well as a powerful intellect.  She was generous and gentle, kind and somewhat reserved, but loyal to her core.  From a very early age I remember simply loving talking to her.  She made me feel like the only place in the world she wanted to be was right there; she listened thoroughly and paid careful attention.

Nana’s birthday and mine were only five days apart we often celebrated them together.  I have several vivid memories of birthdays celebrated with Nana and Ba in August, on their screened-in porch at the back of their home in Providence or on their boat, Fleetwing, with a jug of cosmos from the garden perched in one of the bottle holders by the wheel.  I miss her all the time and wish that cancer hadn’t taken her from us so swiftly and so painfully.  I wish we could have shared many more birthdays.

Please go check out the Tiny Prints/American Cancer Society cards here.  Thank you!!

This sponsored post was written in conjunction with the American Cancer Society/Tiny Prints card collection launch. All content and opinions expressed here are my own.

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You know those people who remind you where you came from, and, more importantly, who you are?

Well, I was fortunate enough to spend this weekend with mine.  And I am a lucky woman to have such phenomenal, funny, brilliant, supportive, and dance-loving friends.  The luckiest woman in the world.

(photo is during the toast MKM and I made to the bride on Friday night.  I wish I had a picture of everyone all together, but I don’t, and this captures the general mood of the weekend rather well.)

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Two godsisters in a boat, on an unforgettable day.

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Highlight of a wonderful weekend: picking up a mooring in the outer harbor, calm, dark August ocean, jumping off of the boat holding hands, cold Heinekens, four children laughing uproariously, friends who are family.

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The summer camp I attended was a vitally important place to me.  I spent nine summers there, up to and including two as a counselor.  In the rapidly shifting seas of my family life (we moved back and forth across and ocean in those nine summers) camp was the one steady place, a raft moored stubbornly, an unmoving spot in a gale. I can’t wait to pick Grace up there tomorrow.  Absolutely my primary motivation in signing her up to go this summer was my firm belief in the importance of independence and my certainty that she would have a terrific, and valuable, experience.  But it was also that I wanted her to share a place that had been so incredibly meaningful to me.  When I am there the memories rise up, as evanescent but as tangible as puffs of sand blowing off of the dunes.

I grew up in the dunes and fields of Brewster, Massachusetts.  I’m as sure of that as I am of anything.  I met several people who remain incredibly important to me.  First, of course, Jessica.  I also made other special friends, like Leigh and Stacy, and another person who I haven’t written much about.  Ours was a unique and formative friendship, platonic and enduring, and I think of him far more often than we are in touch.

He taught me to appreciate a gin and tonic, to understand the healing power of real, deep laughter, and to love John Coltrane.  He gave me a fistful of memories I still return to, an underlined copy of Christopher Robin, and a sliver of belief that I might be worth something as a human being.  If someone so incandescent with life, so filled to the brim with charisma, intelligence, humor, and kindness, saw something in me, well, that was enough for me.  He knows who he is.

Thank you.

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We met in a cluttered cabin full of bunk beds, trunks, old-school tape-deck radios, and pink pattered pillowcases.  We walked to the shower cabin with our shampoo in square plastic buckets with handles, wood chips sticking to our feet even though we wore flipflops.  She starred in the camp musical.  I watched and applauded, my cheeks hurting from smiling.

We sang Christopher Robin and Barges and Landslide.  We walked on the beach at low tide and swam in the ocean at high tide.  We watched movies in an old, damp cabin on rainy days.  We dressed in all white on Sundays, watched the flag come down, and went to weekly vespers services.  We fell in love, with boys and then with men and most of all with each other.

We wrote endless letters back and forth across an ocean.

We stood by each other at the altar on our wedding days, in June 1999 and in September 2000.  Her wedding day: hot and sunny.  My wedding day: pouring rain and thunder.

We had daughters, 12 weeks apart to the day.  She was the first person I called on the morning I got the startling surprise of two faint lines on the pregnancy test.  We read books and poetry and talked about them endlessly.  We kept writing letters, now mostly digitally.  Heartache rolled through each of our lives, leaving a similar burning and emptiness in its wake even though its flavors were different.  We experienced pain and loss and incandescent joy.  We shared it all.

Our hearts always lean back to the ocean and to each other.  Always back to those formative summers on Cape Cod.  Back to beach grass and dunes and tides and sunsets and acoustic music and words, words, unfurling on the page and beyond the horizon.  Back to the girls we were.

And now it is their turn.

Mysteriously I could not find a picture of us as kids at camp.
Top photograph: Matt’s and my engagement party, September 1999.
Bottom photograph: Visit at camp, summer 2010.

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I’m stunned that we are already halfway through summer. This surprise is not unlike the way spring’s arrival startles me every year.  We round the curve to the Fourth of July, cheer at the wonderfully small-town-ish parade at my parents’ house, and suddenly things seem to move more quickly.  Grace is off to sleepaway camp tomorrow.  Whit is hitting tennis balls over the net with increasing regularity.  Everyone (but me) is getting blonder and tanner.

This is the full, hot, high noon of summer.  We have actually drifted past noon, I suspect.  A few images from the past weeks:
She wears her glasses everywhere.

There was much rejoicing when I told Grace and Whit that we are going back to Legoland.

This guy?  Makes me laugh. Every. Single. Day.  I try to let him pull me back from the melancholy that pulls at me like a tide.  Some days, that works.

A beautiful, peaceful walk on our last morning in Martha’s Vineyard.  Lighthouses, like maps, are an ordering theme for my whole life.

Whit got his own library card.

The kids and I made a rainbow cake.  I was reminded of how the chocolate cake for breakfast surprise blew their minds.  They are easily thrilled, these two, and I admit I consider that an excellent thing.  One of the things I want most for my children is that they remain open to moments of wonder, even – or especially – in the smallest details of life.

The annual overnight hike in NH was simply lovely, a respite from real life, a re-immersion in these two women, whom I love so dearly. who are my vital extended family.  The three of us hiked all the way up together, an experience that I adored both in reality and as metaphor.

And then there was a lot of laughing on the deck of the hut.  A whole lot.

And a stunning sunset that, of course, brought tears to my eyes and tapped me immediately back into the eternal, the divine, that which we can glimpse – if we believe in it – all around us at any time.  The truth is I see it in all of these photographs.

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I’m off the grid this weekend.

So, so off the grid.  At a cabin in the White Mountains (that’s the actual cabin, above).  This is the fourth annual trip: we hike up, spend the night, and hike down on Sunday.  We are now a group 40+ strong, half children.  This is another stool adventure, and I am looking forward to spending some time with two of my very dearest friends.  I’m also hoping it won’t rain, and my wipers can take a rest.

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From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Princeton takes reunions very seriously.  Very.  This weekend is my 15th.  This will be Matt’s 3rd reunion and for the first time, we are bringing the kids.  The centerpiece of reunions is the parade on Saturday – the P Rade.  All of the alumni classes put on costumes and parade through campus, while the rest of the gathered alumni stand by the sides of the road and cheer.  You heard me right.  At his first reunion, my 5th, Matt turned to me incredulously and asked if he had unwittingly married into a cult.  Why yes, honey, you did!  I smiled and answered, and then promptly returned my attention to my friends and the orange-clad groups of alumni, ranging in age from 100+ to 22, parading past me.

The P Rade always makes me cry.  It has something in common with why the World War 2 veterans walking in the Fourth of July parade in Marion make me cry.  The first class to march in the P Rade is the 25th reunion, and after them comes the Old Guard, is the oldest returning alumni (of which my grandfather is now a proud member).  These men are elderly, some of them walking, some riding in golf carts.  There are always some widows in this group, who come back in their husband’s honor.  The embodiment of how much a place can mean to a person brings tears to my eyes, as does the visible evidence of time’s relentless forward turning.  For these men, I’m certain, it feels like mere moments ago they were the graduating class, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, singing bawdily, rowdily into the spring air, more in touch with their futures and their promise than they ever would be again.

I know, because that was just me.  Mere moments ago, I swear.  And now I’m in the thick of the pack, among the strollers and toddlers and grade schoolers.  This year I’ll have my own children walking beside me, holding my hands.  Both Whit’s godmother and one of Grace’s will be walking with us; simply writing that makes me cry.  How to capture or express the feeling when the past, the present, and the future are all animate in a single moment, in a place that was – and still is – home to me as nowhere else ever has been?  I can’t even begin to do that.  I’m emotional about and nostalgic for a moment I have not even lived yet.

The P Rade is tradition exemplified.  Our fierce commitment to it speaks, I think, of the deep human need to feel a part of something.  It is authentic, the love that swells through the crowd on watching the Old Guard and the young graduates and everybody in between.  There are always many tear-soaked cheeks, and even the most sophisticated or cynical of my friends give themselves over to the rolling pride and belonging and nostalgia that is tangible in the air during the P Rade.

I’m reminded, as I think about this weekend, of how I too loved Princeton from the first time I set foot on its campus.  I visited with my father, Labor Day weekend of 1991, and within an hour of our wandering around I knew I wanted to go there.  Somehow I half-grasped the significance the place would have for me and in an instant made a decision that would alter the course of my life forever (to withdraw my early application elsewhere and to pursue the magnolia-strewn road I’d precipitously, and firmly, decided I wanted).  For someone who makes most decisions cautiously, who is only now learning to trust the voice of her soul, this kind of instinctive, impulsive change of course was distinctly out of character.  And how extraordinarily thankful I am about that to this day.

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