Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

In another, researchers took a group of students to the base of a steep hill and fitted them with heavy backpacks before sending them up the slope. Some walked next to friends, while others walked alone, and the students who walked with friends gave lower estimates of the weight of the pack. The longer the friends had known each other, the lighter they reported the backpack to be.

I’d lost my flashlight and the pink tape measure was not mine, but sometimes what you pack and what you own are not the same. Aren’t we all magpies, more or less? Borrowing from our friends’ lives as fast as we can, gathering what we need to live?