Restoration

My friend Janice drove into the city and we met up at the Arthouse Bar to sip margaritas in the balmy New York night and catch up on our lives. That was our sidewalk view. We had the best time, dissecting recent happenings and internal evolutions of self, talking as mothers do about our children, and enjoying the whimsy and soul baring made possible by going on three decades of friendship. We did bemoan the fact that our little circle of friends who found one another when our kids attended the same grade school, did not survive the covid years entirely intact. We gather as a group hardly at all now, though the mothers still get together one on one, and sometimes in threes or fours, but seldom the whole posse anymore. One friend in particular has drifted farthest away. Her first grandchild was born on the day in March 2020 that covid lockdowns went into effect, and to the rest of us, it seems she has fully disappeared into that enchanted country. 

I see Janice much less often, too. During covid, she retired from her job as an art teacher and moved upstate to make her beautiful ceramic sculptures full time. Another one of the group, Isabella, bought a country house upstate with her husband, and now spends her weekends there. She usually comes back to the city on Mondays for her therapy practice, and we occasionally meet for dinner on a weekday evening. Some weeks she stays upstate, as the covid years normalized talk therapy via Zoom. Isabella still prefers to see clients in person at least some of the time, but she now has options that allow her to enjoy the changing colors of the trees in beautiful New Paltz, a bustling college town with al fresco cafes, wine bars, farmers markets, and a lively student vibe. We've visited her there, and grilled our lunch on her patio while looking out at the woods. It was a charmed. Another of our group still has not quite come back from covid quarantines; she is nervous in crowds now, so it was an act of love when she attended my daughter's wedding unmasked. 

For my part, work has sometimes been all consuming, though I do look up from my screen and allow myself to touch the nostalgia, the ache I feel for the greater connectedness of our pre-covid days. Maybe I'm just imagining that it was so. Or maybe we all just got used to being at home more, to being in a little bubble with immediate family. Maybe we discovered the joys of being still, not having to show up anywhere, of unstructured time to fill as we chose. And yet, I miss my friends. I miss the gathering of women, sometimes with our husbands and children, the pot lucks with mismatched hand-made crockery, the rooftop evenings basking in the pink orange glow of the setting sun. I miss the New Years eve nights around tables laden with food, watching the ball drop on TV, then texting our children and other beloveds in the minutes after. I realize we're all in a new stage now, and life may simply be asking me to practice acceptance of our respective journeys.

Still, Janice and I agreed that we two Taurus women together, old friends meeting up to share hearts in the New York City night, was a kind of spiritual restoration.