Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

movies make the most of situations like this but life rarely does.

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.

Beowulf’s Grendel traveled off the moors to visit Heorot because he wanted to stand listening outside the great hall of friendship.

guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.”

Friendship is sweet beyond the sweetness of life (St. Augustine) Friendship is inherently a magnet (Eudora Welty) Friends are the family we choose (Anonymous) Happy is the house that shelters a friend (Emerson) Friends are God’s apology for relations (Hugh Kingsmill) Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness (Euripides)

“Guilty as charged.” Small talk is like improv comedy: rarely funny and always one sentence away from fizzling. When I must do it, clichés fill my head like a virus.

Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.’”

Inside Heorot there was nothing but friendship.

We live in a time when everyone gets a medal and all villains have heartbreaking backstories. No one thinks evil is intrinsic anymore, just someone making a really bad choice.

Trying to find a substitute family when yours is missing is as daring an adventure as any man versus monster.

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.

“We take our friends as we find them, not as we would make them,” Samuel Johnson wrote.

trip is a journey or an excursion, but it can also be a stumble or misstep.

It was a delightful visit—perfect, in being much too short. (Jane Austen) Fish and visitors stink in three days. (Benjamin Franklin)

I could say we’ve grown more comfortable with peace than joy, patience over hope, and perseverance feels the same as love.

This is why the English have tea, the Germans have the Kuchenstunde (cake hour), and Americans eat too much ice cream. No one needs to eat between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, but it is a pleasure. It is also the best way to extend good cheer until cocktail hour.

‘Yet there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’”

that a cloud has to be 150 feet thick before it blocks the sun.

New York was a walking city. Everything was walking distance, she said,

SOME PEOPLE, the presence of a visitor acts as a kind of stimulant, inspiring outings and fine meals. Lindy is like this. For others, a visitor registers as grit in the gears, leaving everyone a bit sluggish and on edge.

so I refrained from telling her that a flower show in a convention center is like a ship in a bottle, strange and unnatural.

When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beauty of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings play friends? And do we make friends or find them? Emily Dickinson thought the best verb was enact.

Here’s a word: reside, from the Latin sidere, “to sink or settle.” Can you change where you reside because someone died? It’s such a modern idea to even contemplate it. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort in the home was so unfamiliar, no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Prior to World War I, the drawing room was often referred to as the “death room” because it was where the bodies of loved ones were laid out. After the world wars, the shelter magazine known as Ladies’ Home Journal suggested it was high time for a “living room” and the term took hold.

The recluse decides when and to whom she will speak, access is limited.

Xavier de Maistre’s book-length memoir, Voyage Around My Room, is witty to some, but reads like a horror story to me. When you are alone in a room, time is slow and not particularly nice. It will wait in the dusty corner and taunt and try to convince you there’s not much point in doing anything. Stay, rest. Wait it out. Penelope waited upstairs. So did my mother. I do not want to do the same.

Dunbar number—the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships—and

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.”

There is no friend as loyal as a book.’ Ernest Hemingway.”

This is the problem: conversations like this, where one is more deeply invested than the other, can be frustratingly staggered and incomplete. Vanessa hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Postcards? That’s romantic.

the question of what you want to own is closely related to how you want to live.

when people are asked what is most important to them in a friendship, the top two answers are consistently loyalty and kindness.

so it turns out this bark shedding allows the plane to thrive in air pollution. For this reason it is planted in cities all over the world.

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.

“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.”

Two people, side by side, looking straight ahead. I think C. S. Lewis was onto something.

“Miss you already,” it said, followed by a tree and a heart emoji.

and am not a fan of the text. But if a certain poetry is being lost, perhaps a sense of immediacy and presence is being gained. Those words and, yes, those pictures right then made me happy.

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.

The Japanese have a word for them, hibakujumoku, trees that survived the blast. The six trees, though charred, were soon healthy again and are still alive today.