Last Days of Summer

http://polaroid41.com/last-days-of-summer/

Wednesday, August 26th – 9:27pm.

A lazy late August day. Beach holidays done, suitcases put away, but not yet time to return to school. I decided to take my son, Elliot, to see friends of ours who live in the country about 45 minutes drive from Toulouse. Normally we see each other “en famille”, that’s to say, the three of us and the five of them: Fanny, Fouad and their three daughters aged 11, 8 and 3. But Fouad was working and I wanted to offer my husband an afternoon to himself (a luxury after months of lockdown and school closures and summer vacation), so it was just Fanny and I and the kids.

Miraculously, the littlest one took her nap despite the excitement of visitors and the other kids all scooted off to play and Fanny and I found ourselves free to just sit and talk, uninterrupted. This never happens.

Fanny isn’t exactly one of my “girlfriends.” We don’t get together for girlie drinks or nights out, we aren’t in a whatsapp group thread of girlfriends where we talk and vent and share all the little details of our lives. But I have known Fanny for almost fifteen years now and she holds a very special place in my heart…more like a sister or a cousin. Like family. I actually know her because she and my husband went to high school together. So she was his friend first. Without that link, I don’t know that we would have been drawn to each other or ever even crossed each other’s paths. That said, I’m so glad she’s in my life. She’s smart and articulate and opinionated. I was intimidated by her at first and it took me years before I felt like I could hold my own with her in French. We’ve seen each other grow a lot in the last 15 years and she has been there at all of the major milestones in my life. I am so, so close with my two sisters, and we are always with each other in spirit, but with the distance it’s rare for us to be physically together. Fanny was the first person who held Elliot after his papa and me. She held him before he even had a name.

As I said, it was a late August day. Fanny is a teacher and the feeling of a new school year approaching was in the air. We took the time to take stock, to talk about where we’ve been and where we are going. It was an unexpected little gift of an afternoon, before the busyness of September.

The littlest one woke up from her nap and Elliot wanted to go for walk on the trails to a rock quarry, and the three of us headed off.

When we got back an hour later, Fanny was dusting off her hands and told me she felt like she’d successfully repotted all of her plants. As a teacher she often gets flowering plants as gifts at the end of the school year, and they eventually need to be transplanted from their little decorative gift pots. She added, “I had to wait till now though, because you can’t do it when they’re flowering.”

I didn’t know this and something about this little gardener’s wisdom feels profound. When a plant is flowering and looking its most vibrant and audacious, it is too fragile to disturb. When it’s flowering it can’t be uprooted and changed.

This surprised me at first but it makes sense. I feel the same way, in fact. I am able to shine bright and blossom but only when my roots are intact. I looked at Fanny and my heart squeezed with gratitude. Our friendship, like the afternoon we spent together, isn’t the stuff of bright flashy flowers, but rather the steadfastness of the roots that allow me to grow.

Everything has a season.