A Crossroads
Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.
Medication helped, for a while. Mainly I recall it giving me for a few months a pleasant sense of the present. I went to Washington, D.C., for a landscaping conference around that time and I remember with fondness the new and sudden ease of my morning routine. The edges of everything seemed clearer. And I don’t mean just the lovely things like trees and the sunrise and the flowering kale (genus Brassica) planted everywhere in that city, but tubes of toothpaste and pots of face cream. It was easier to wash my face in the morning. In fact, it was a pleasure. I believed again in the possibility of a new day, the present one and the next one after that.
The facts of my life seemed clearer to me and I was able to think about them with a new kind of resolve. Not a resolve to do better; just a steady sense that this was the way things stood and it wasn’t necessarily a catastrophe:
I have no hobbies and no desire to develop one.
I read books, but not always the best ones. I often say I like biographies, but in truth I rarely finish them, the last part of the life, the descent toward death, too depressing.
I am not a good cook.
I cannot sing and no longer play an instrument.
I am neither an early riser nor a night owl, so can claim no virtue in those realms.
Animals tolerate me but are not drawn to me.
The same is true of children.
I worry about the world but have never given much time to charitable work.
I cannot paint or speak a foreign language.
I own one cat, Hester, who is undeniably lonely.
I have not traveled much, a particular disappointment given my surname, Attaway, an Old English name that derives from the words for “at the way” and referred to someone who lived close to the road. Somewhere on the misty moors of England when naming began, a few people looked around and saw trees (Ash) or a whole stand of them (Ashworth) and named themselves accordingly. Others considered the work they did (Smith, Potter, Mason), or the town they were near (Walls). But my ancestor looked around and was inspired by the road, a means of travel and change. She must have stood “at the way” just as I stand on the bridge over the train tracks near my house in Anneville, turning north, then south, wondering about the possibilities in each direction.
I WORK AS A GARDENER for the university, which was certainly not what I’d planned. The first plants I remember tending were a series of African violets that suffered and died on my childhood windowsill. Their velvety leaves hate water, but I poured indiscriminately. Next there was a red geranium that lasted as long as it could (about two weeks) in the shade of my bookshelf. I don’t know who gave me these plants or why I so glaringly neglected them; I was otherwise very careful about looking after my room. When the plants died, I remember carrying them out to the compost pile by the garage, each gloomy procession giving me the distinct impression I did not have a green thumb.
In college I kept a few dusty dorm plants; then, briefly in New York City, my studio apartment didn’t get enough light to grow anything green even if I’d tried. But when I moved back to Anneville, something changed. Suddenly I wanted a whole garden. Years later it was pointed out to me that guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.” I had come home, in part, to help care for my mother. I started reading gardening books and drawing plans. I was enthusiastic and optimistic, and if I was neglecting other aspects of my life (such as finding a job or my own apartment), I thought the payoff would be armfuls of flowers that would make us all feel better.
It didn’t work out that way, but my interest survived and I eventually applied to the Landscape Architecture program at the university. Landscape architects are responsible for creating pleasing natural environments for people to enjoy. It could be a backyard or a park, a campus or a playground, a public road, highway, or parking lot. We’re taught to carefully analyze the terrain to be planted, then create a design that works in harmony with everything around it. I completed two years, then took a job with the grounds crew at the university. It turned out I was less interested in designing spaces for other people than in working with the plants myself.
The job suits me, and I like working with Susan Mint, with whom I am often paired by our boss, Blake O’Dell, for bed maintenance around the university grounds. Sue is about a decade older than I am and prides herself on never having had an indoor job. “I started raking leaves as a kid to supplement my allowance,” she told me. “Never looked back.”
Sue and I go days talking about only the work at hand, but occasionally she has more to say, and by that I mean I don’t know if we’re friends, but she’s a good coworker. She has a sense of humor I enjoy. Once, describing a garden designer we both know, she said, “She has a tendency to overdesign. I mean, she draws in her eyebrows, for god’s sake.”
Now Sue said, “I had a weird dream last night.” We were raking the beds around the English Department, disturbing the little spring weeds. “I had my own landscaping company and a friend wanted me to landscape her yard.” Sue stretched her back. “But she wanted a local stream redirected across her property and through her living room.”
I stopped raking. “What?”
“Yeah, I know. At first I worried about damage to the watershed, too. Of course. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”
I waited.
“Watersheds are threatened everywhere, right? So bring them into your home to protect them. That was the idea, anyway, and somehow it made sense in the dream. I cut the path in a curve and used bluestone to build the banks. I even put in a small cascade. It was beautiful, but news of the project spread and then everyone wanted the same thing.”
“That’s terrible.”
Sue nodded. She has strong forearms from years of gardening. A dusting of soil coated the skin visible between the top of her floral work gloves and the pushed-up sleeves of her black T-shirt.
“What was the name of your company?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It didn’t have one.”
I didn’t know what else to say, and Sue looked as if she regretted sharing the dream. We both went back to raking.
THE IDEA TO VISIT MY FRIENDS began with an article I read that spring in the book section of the newspaper commemorating the anniversary of the death of the writer Amber Dwight. On a March afternoon fifteen years earlier, a plane carrying Amber and her parents had crashed into a mountain in North Carolina. She was on a tour promoting her first novel and her father, who had a small plane pilot’s license, had been flying her around the country to her events. There were no survivors.
Immediately after her death the outpouring of grief from her friends around the country was enormous. A popular web magazine had created a site where people who knew Amber could share memories. And—this is important—it was before the advent of Facebook and Twitter and the page had been set up for posts only. For months people shared beautiful stories, and no one could like or judge or comment. The site was still up and you could read through the posts and come to your own conclusions, without cacophony. There was a quiet elegance to it, a hushed quality, missing from today’s internet.
Most of her friends were writers of one kind or another, so their various remembrances and elegies were bound to be well written. Still, it was obvious reading through the site that there had been something extraordinary about Amber. There were stories about her generosity, her loyalty, her sense of fun and adventure, her expertise on everything from used-car parts to brownie recipes. She was very opinionated, but everyone seemed to agree that the opinions were well informed, insightful, and usually for the benefit of someone else’s problem. People wrote that to meet her was a historical event, one you would remember for the rest of your life.
The article was accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Amber, and I wondered if it had been her author photo. She was looking straight at the viewer, her head tilted, not smiling but not unsmiling either. She looked like she’d been a good listener.
Amber was the campfire around which a lot of people gathered. And the amazing thing was that the people on either side of you, also huddling close to Amber? They might change your life, too. She created possibility of all sorts. —Helen
I read the site through from beginning to end, then went back to the beginning and read it again. My fascination rapidly became disappointment that I hadn’t known her. We grew up in different states, but from the posts I learned we’d arrived in New York City the same year, the same month. While I was surviving alone on ramen noodles and taking endless walks in Central Park because I couldn’t afford to do much else, she was apparently hosting notorious dinner parties, not because she was wealthy but because her life seemed charmed. But that’s not fair. Maybe it was charmed, but she also seemed to be kind and made things happen.
I’ve lived in the same building for ten years and still don’t know the woman across the hall from me. Amber knew all her neighbors, and there was always some fun connection, like the guy downstairs, who was able to get her the orange paint she wanted for her living room because he was a set designer, or the woman upstairs who was teaching her how to sew. One year I tried to copy her—I made banana bread and gave my neighbors poinsettias at Christmas—but it didn’t have the same effect. No one created a friendly neighborhood as effortlessly as Amber. —Claire
Amber was befriending the neighbors and painting her apartment fun colors while I was struggling to do my laundry. I’d missed out on something, and I wasn’t surprised. I have always assumed others have more and better friends. Amber was an extraordinary friend to many people and I wished I’d been one of them, even if it meant sharing now in the acute pain of the community she’d created.
What was obvious in post after post was that Amber had a talent for friendship, which, I suddenly understood, was something one could be good at, like cooking or singing. You could be good at being a friend, and no sooner had I had the thought than I knew I was not. I had some friends, but did I have a community? No. Would a group of us someday rent a beach house together and have a weekend of frivolous yet somehow poignant fun? Never. Most of my friends do not know one another, and even if they did, I’m certain they would not consider me the center of anything.
As I read over and over again the stories of Amber and her character, I tried to imagine myself writing something similar about one of my friends. Or one of them writing about me. I thought of my oldest friend, Lindy, a woman I’ve known since seventh grade. We’d played soccer together in high school, were both in the orchestra, and once had a ferocious argument about whether hot fudge or strawberry topping at Dairy Queen was healthier. We went to different universities, and while I eventually moved back to our hometown, she never did. I see her now and then when she comes back with her children to visit her parents, but we aren’t in touch regularly. I know her to be a kind and creative person who would probably be happy to hear from me if I picked up the phone and called her tomorrow. I consider her a friend based largely on our shared past, but do I really know her? Are we friends or just two people whose paths crossed in childhood, when bonds are more easily formed?
I knew Amber for one day. Our publicists paired us for a book signing, so we met for coffee before the event. I haven’t found many lasting friends since junior high or high school, but I liked Amber right away. I had this feeling we might become friends, that we would become friends, if it was okay with her. I’m heartbroken that that possibility is gone. —Elizabeth