My friend Elle, from two blogs ago, has less than three months of life on earth. This is Day 3. 

We started in the laundry room of a wilderness park. We were campers—Elle and her partner in a little trailer, I, tenting. Different sections of the park.  

I went to the laundry room to charge my phone for a telephone job interview. 

When I entered, Elle was standing there folding things in little piles, separated male, female, shirts, underwear, socks, shorts—it was August. A clothes dryer was drumming opposite her. I thought: look at her, folding her husband’s boxer shorts. She’s that kind of woman, performing the gender role. (I later told her my first impression and we howled at my ladder-of-inference.) 

We greeted each other with recognition, having met the day before at the canoe launch. I’d pulled up after a day’s paddle. She was at the water’s edge with a bunch of men and women, enjoying the soft late afternoon sun. Everyone exchanged pleasantries about my state-of-the-art vessel and I thought: now there’s some good people. 

In the laundry room, I took a seat next to the sink where there was a bench and a plug. I opened my book on my lap. She sorted and folded on the other side of the narrow room. There is no doubt we were sizing each other up. 

As we chatted, our words and voices seemed to land in the other’s mind and heart like seeds in loamy soil. We frequently watered the seeds by looking across the room at each other, making eye contact. It became irresistible. She asked a question so relevant it sent a root down; I asked a question so probing it drove a shoot up. Back and forth like that we sprinkled and shone until the laundry room became a misty field of clover and wild flowers. Until we, content, became wakened birds testing reality by our sweet questionings.*

Someone came in. We welcomed them as fellow campers do, but they soon left. My phone became ready. The job interview was about to start. When we parted, we didn’t say that we’d see each other again, but I only vaguely worried that we wouldn’t. How perilous. What an idiot. What if we hadn’t?

What would my life be like now without Elle? 

Imponderable. 

But the goodness about life looked after us. The following summer, we randomly (as if) ran into each other at the park office and struck up repartee. That’s how it is with her jovial partner. Great repartee. They invited me to their site for 4 that afternoon. 

Then we went on paddles and adventures. 

One early evening, we all drank too much at my site. I should have fed them other than nuts, but my camp fare was meagre, apportioned to the number of my days there and no pantry from which to rustle. It’s the kind of thing she’d remember, just as I do. I must ask her. 

In the remaining days. I can count. Elle can count

I visited them early at their site one morning. Elle laughed (I think in joy) at my enthusiasm. Elle and I sat in the fen and talked and talked and talked and talked until she said, this is the last of it, I’ve got to go back up to the trailer, to her life with her partner and get on with the day ahead. To me this was the day ahead. But I roused myself from my rapture.

Elle is a mystic. I am her student. Now, a dozen or so years later, I can’t recall what we talked about in the laundry room. The substance was in the listening seeds, the landings, the field, the sweet wakenings. We do this all the time. 

I don’t know how else to cherish Elle except to intimately re-live each budding second of our friendship. Each instance in which two minds and hearts flow in unison.

A tranquil pool for the soul to notice it is not longing.   

* misty fiields, wakened birds, testing reality and sweet questionings are from Wallace Stephens’ poem ‘Sunday Morning’.