Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

I was interested in figuring out who I 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.

And yet how many of us can say we’ve made an accommodation, a sacrifice seemingly against our very nature, for a friend?

Yet spending time with friends is the first thing we drop when life gets busy.

To me, bare feet and travel go together as well as spiders and cuisine.

How can we live in a time when social media makes us friends with people all over the world, but our sense of neighbor is shrinking?

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

A postcard would travel publicly by U.S. postal service across three thousand miles, but the act of buying, writing, stamping, and sending it suddenly felt more intimate than anything else I could do. This was a broadcast to one, after all, not one and a crowd of follower-friends.

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.

He said recent measurements indicated those trees, too, were growing much faster than they should have been. Blake had talked with several people at the U.S. Forest Service about what he was noticing on campus and they told him recent measurements from around the world showed mature evergreens of all species now regularly exceeding previously recorded height records by twenty to thirty feet. “Why?” I asked. Blake settled a little coral impatiens bursting with buds into the soil. “Global warming,” he said. “I think they’re trying to save us.” I pretended to have some trouble getting the next seedling out of its flat so he wouldn’t see my eyes filling with water. We worked for a while in silence and then, without pausing in his planting, Blake said, “I don’t think I’d ever take out a sugar maple.”

Settle. The word gives me pause. You can settle a dispute and you can settle into a life. In its transitive form it means “to place so as to stay.” I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can.