Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me.

A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how

anyone proceeded under the accumulated...

“If you had children, May, you’d know folks don’t want glass on the doorstep. A child could knock it over and get hurt.”

when do you work into a conversation the difficult details of your life? Am I supposed to give them all the information for their benefit, to explain my eccentricities? Maybe I should put up a sign? Yes. Let’s all have signs up and down the street announcing our personal disasters and disappointments. That would be helpful, perhaps even neighborly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. I was in the presence of only one tree, but it was enough.

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.

A best friend holds your

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.