Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbor or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence.

And travel. It’s from the Middle English travailen, which meant originally “to toil or labor; torture.”

The facts of my life seemed clearer to me and I was able to think about them with a new kind of resolve. Not a resolve to do better; just a steady sense that this was the way things stood and it wasn’t necessarily a catastrophe:

I’d missed out on something, and I wasn’t surprised. I have always assumed others have more and better friends.

You could be good at being a friend, and no sooner had I had the thought than I knew I was not.

I had some friends, but did I have a community? No. Would a group of us someday rent a beach house together and have a weekend of frivolous yet somehow poignant fun? Never. Most of my friends do not know one another, and even if they did, I’m certain they would not consider me the center of anything.

I consider her a friend based largely on our shared past, but do I really know her? Are we friends or just two people whose paths crossed in childhood, when bonds are more easily formed?

No one thinks evil is intrinsic anymore, just someone making a really bad choice.

was being given an enormous gift of time and I wanted to use it well.

was with other people, and why that person was hard to be. I remember my mother, not a great keeper of friends herself, used to say, “If you’re comfortable with yourself, you’ll never be lonely,” which didn’t feel like the whole story.

A trip to the bookstore had suggested my choices were to run to nature (see number 1), disappear into books, or both.

If “Friends are the family we choose,” as the adage goes, I was worried I hadn’t paid enough attention.

Halfway through life, I wasn’t sure what I’d made.

Afterward I was certain of only one thing: friendship is hard to define. Epicurus believed it was necessary for a happy life. Aristotle believed it was necessary for a good life. Cicero thought life wasn’t worth living without friends, but that they should be made slowly and cautiously. Montaigne thought friendship occurred once every three hundred years and he was, of course, one of the lucky ones. Oscar Wilde said a friend is one who stabs you in the front, and C. S. Lewis proposed ideograms: if lovers are two people facing each other enraptured by the other’s gaze, then friends are two people standing side by side, looking ahead in the same direction.

For cross-species friendship, three criteria must be met: the bond must be sustained for some period of time, both animals must be engaged, and there must be some sort of accommodation on both sides.

My father told me once about friendship, “You have to decide if you’re going to take the bad with the good,” advice I did not find, then or now, especially helpful.

You grow up thinking it’s natural for the ones who love you most to keep their distance. Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.

“I’m not for everyone, I know that. But I do have some friends.”

I think it’s the responsibility of good friends to be very honest and sometimes say hard things.”

They say friendship alleviates physical health problems and increases our level of happiness. They say that spending time with friends can lower blood pressure, decrease depression and stress, and help relieve chronic pain.

Sometimes the door to friendship doesn’t open as far as you think it might, and you’re vulnerable standing there on the threshold, not yet in or out.

The best way to travel is to surrender a little bit of your personality, and I was enjoying not being the most difficult one.

then Lindy turned to straighten the living room before bed. Each of my friends has a distinguishing trait or gesture that I sometimes don’t identify until I see it in a stranger.

Sometimes I think my mother slowly removed herself from the story until the story simply no longer had a role for her to play.

Here’s a question: If a friend tries to make conversation out of a social media post you’ve already seen, do you let her? Consider it, because new material can be awkward.

So Penelope had Athena boosting her beauty at opportune moments; I had a four-year-old telling me I was grayer than her mother.

Neera burst into tears. When a friend is suffering, it seems you have three options: You can sit silently with her, you can make suggestions, or you can share heartache from your own life. None of the three is as simple as it sounds.

“I don’t need closure on the day. There’s just going to be another one in the morning.”

Just as it is unwise to offer unsolicited parenting advice, so, too, gardening tips.

A house becomes a home when a person or a group of people has an emotional attachment to it.

When you are alone in a room, time is slow and not particularly nice.

Years later it occurred to me that when someone says what my grandfather did, what they mean, what would be far more accurate, is “She is trying to love you as best she can.” This might be okay with you, or it might not. It might not be what you need at all.

It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.

“Global warming,” he said. “I think they’re trying to save us.”

Being a good host is all about anticipating need and we didn’t have the energy for that. And we didn’t visit much because being a good guest requires knowing how to let yourself be welcomed. We weren’t good at that either.

A pigeon that looked like it had had a rough night, too, paced back and forth in front of me.

These were my people, but I still wanted them to go away.

The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.

Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.

“Because certain things only come into focus when a person is gone. It’s sad but true. You need memory and loss to polish your thoughts. Otherwise you’re just writing a speech or an introduction or something.”

Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.

May you settle and find good friends.