Lapis for love, for friendship

Welcome to the new home for my blog. I will continue to post short musings, reflections, glimpses of day-to-day life, and garden updates. I might also branch out. Thoughts about writing? Poems that move me? Links to music? Book reviews? Anything is possible so stay tuned.

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I recently met a new friend for coffee. I was feeling shy, as I sometimes do, so I wore the lapis earrings that once belonged to my friend Fran, who died in 2006.

A couple of years before Fran died, when she was in the middle of living with an aggressive cancer, she and her husband travelled to the southwest. She returned with lapis earrings for her friends—the ones she gave me were shaped like small fish. Lapis for love, for friendship, she said.

I wore them one winter day not long after she gave them to me. I had on a high-collared coat and scarf. When I got in my car at the end of a meal with friends, I realized I was missing an earring. I poked through piles of slush around the car, groped under and around the car seats, went back inside the restaurant to search our booth. No earring. I was bereft.

After Fran died, her husband invited her friends to choose items from her jewelry box. I immediately spotted a pair of lapis earrings she’d bought for herself on that southwestern trip and took them home with me; I wear them often, especially when I feel like I need a friend’s helping hand.

Shortly before Fran died, we talked about death and dying. Was there an afterlife? We were both skeptical. But I remembered the experience I’d had after my mom died, the strong sense all that summer that mom was near me as I navigated buying a house, moving, making a nest for myself, all while grieving for her. I told Fran about this. If there is an afterlife, will you come back and let me know? I joked.

I’ve had no Fran sightings. Just memories and the earrings.

Things have power. My sister died in December; in January I flew to England for her funeral, which took place in the village church just down the lane from the house she’d lived in for over forty years. She was buried next to her husband in the cemetery behind the church.

I both dreaded and welcomed the funeral—dreaded being far away from home when I needed the comfort of friends, welcomed the opportunity to say good-by to my sister in the place she most loved.

On the day of the funeral, I wore a necklace that had belonged to my mother, a scarf my sister gave me, earrings my mom had given me. Wearing these items I could feel my mother and sister standing on either side of me, holding me in that cold church and then at the grave high on a bright chilly hill.