No Regrets

By TAD BARTIMUS

Sitting at the old harvest table with cups of coffee between us, we take each other's measure. Yes, we each think, even after five years apart our old friend is in there somewhere, underneath that unfamiliar hair style, behind those new horn-rims. We reconnect as if one of us has briefly left the room, then returned to pick up the conversation with "and then..."

Our families lived beside the same river, on the land and of it, long enough to help fill up a country cemetery. Somewhere there's a picture of us taken at my seventh birthday party, blowing paper horns and wearing dunce caps, having a fine old time. Like our parents' lives, proximity and friendship stretched out before us like a double helix.

Then I moved away.

But I never quite let go of the place that shaped me. From time to time I'd drop in and we'd compare lives. Much of this was done while driving around looking at ancient haunts: my grandmother's old house where the concrete birdbath is decorated with my blue marbles; the river bottom where the Big Flood ruined our last crop; the once-jumpin' supper club where our parents used to dance until dawn.

On this visit we realize that our separate paths are pretty well set on the course we'll walk to the end. We talk freely, for the first time, about roads not taken.

I look around at my friend's new "dream" house filled with her mother's antiques and endless views of waving prairie grass and surprise myself with a pang of envy. The house is just 10 miles from the spot where she was born, only 15 miles from the old wedding-cake farmhouse where she and her high school sweetheart raised their kids, harvested corn, canned beans and went broke. My friend has spent most of her life looking at a big sky in a small space, knowing exactly where she belongs.

I have been a gypsy, never staying long enough to grow a tree up to shade. I went the corporate route but, like my friend who got caught in the farm crisis of the 1980s, I also lost financial security through circumstance. She has children and grandchildren; I don't. My furniture, picked up willy-nilly from the tropics to the arctic, doesn't match; none of it is fine or old. I left my high school sweetheart behind and didn't marry until I was 30. Now, unlike my friend who is settling comfortably into retirement , my husband and I are working harder than ever at new careers.

"What if..." my friend wonders, echoing my thoughts.

This is not a question she expects answered. But on a perfect autumn day, with someone you've known longer than time, the grass can still look greener in somebody else's pasture. So I tell her that Abraham Lincoln was right, people get what they want. And given the chance, we wouldn't trade places for anything.

It is only the best of friends who can probe and poke at each other's soft spots. As our ancestors used to say, we know where all the bodies are buried in each other's lives: who drank too much; who ran off with somebody else's wife; who gambled away the family fortune. My friend and I speak with the same accent, understand the same colloquialisms, laugh at the same stories. No matter how far apart we get, our curiosity and spirit springs from the same tap root.

Being with my friend reminds me of a 19th century Shaker hymn:

'Tis a gift to be simple,
'Tis a gift to be free,
'Tis a gift to come down
Where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves
In the place that's right
'Twill be in the valley
Of love and delight.

© Copyright 1998-2000 The Women Syndicate. The content on these pages is the property of The Women Syndicate and may not be used without express permission. Contact friends@tadbartimus.com