Nancy and I became best friends two weeks after I moved into the big house on Duncan Street. She appeared at our door one morning wearing one of her smocked dresses and with her braids tied with crisp ribbons. She introduced herself to my mother.
“I’m Nancy Jane MacBeth,” she said. “I heard you have a little girl my age and I would like to be her friend.”
It was 1941. We were both five years old.
Nancy and I became fast friends. We both had vivid imaginations, so every day was an adventure. We played house, school, and office. We loved to colour and bake mud pies in the sunshine.
One day we came up with a wonderful idea—every Monday for the rest of our lives we would give each other a gift.
My first gift to her was a ring with a blue stone. It cost five cents—half of my weekly allowance. Oh, the excitement that first Monday when we exchanged small boxes! What gift would I get from Nancy? A ring? A brooch? A hair ribbon? But all I found in the box was a flower—a dark purple pansy resting on a bed of cotton batting.
“It’s just a pansy,” I said, disappointment in my voice.
“But it’s special,” Nancy answered. “Feel it … it’s as soft as velvet.”
I can remember only two other gifts I bought for Nancy with my pennies—a hair clip with bluebirds on it and a “genuine” cricket clicker. I can’t recall any of the others. But I can remember what she gave me: half a newly hatched robin’s egg, a special hiding place in Mrs. MacKenzie’s hedges for those summer games of hide-and-seek, a nest of naked, pink baby mice in an old crate in the storage shed (we sat as quiet as mice ourselves and watched them), and a spider’s web, under construction.
One very special gift was permission to sit on her own private branch of the huge birch tree in her backyard. I looked up to see the sunshine falling in bits and pieces through the leaves and looked down to see the patterns of sun and shade on the grass. I heard the ocean for the first time in a cowry shell in her father’s study and saw the sunset through the rose-coloured glass of the round window on the front stair landing.
Eventually I tired of the gift giving. I complained to my mother, “Every week I buy Nancy a nice present from the store and she just gives me things I can’t keep.”
“Are you sure?” my mother asked. “It sounds to me as if she’s given you some very special gifts.”
“But they’re not real presents,” I insisted.
Nancy and I had a falling out over the whole thing. It was a nasty, name-calling fight that five-year-olds excel at. We cancelled the “best friends for life” clause and I went home and ground the robin’s eggshell into a fine blue powder.
A year later Nancy was killed in a traffic accident. She was seven years old.
But Nancy’s gifts remain. Every spring as I stoop to feel the velvet faces of the pansies in my garden I think of her. I carefully pick up the pieces of a robin’s egg should I find them. And while I no longer climb trees, I never pass under a birch tree without looking up to see the sunlight playing on the leaves.
At five, Nancy knew the secret of giving gifts that truly last a lifetime. How blessed I am to have had her for a friend.
Naramata, British Columbia