Time Has No Bones

Yesterday a friend came to visit in the late afternoon. We sat in the driveway, masked and distanced, at the edge of the orchard, drinking tea and eating macadamia nuts as the light faded and the moon rose above the hills. The weather was unsettled, and now and then there was a misting of rain, and we were chilly, even bundled up in our down jackets, sweaters, and scarves. We don’t see this friend very often, and his visit was a gift, but he also brought a gift, a lemon-yellow cardboard canister filled with chocolate cookies from an Italian deli, and as he passed it to me, I noticed tiny raindrops beaded on its lid like dew, and its yellow was so bright and saturated, for an instant it was a lantern. Our friend was passing a lantern to us, or so it seemed.

A lantern. I suppose that’s as good a metaphor as any for friendship. In this dark time, we light the way for one another. We see one another. We find meaning in a pool of light, or laugh at our brightly illuminated folly. Our need for one another has been underscored during these months, and even in our separateness our mutual love has grown too strong to go unspoken.

In the meantime, the amorphous hours slide by, strewn with nouns and verbs but minus a clear narrative. So many of the usual routines and markers that give structure to the day are altered or deleted. The things we looked forward to are muted and uncertain, and we only now begin to realize how much we constructed our existence around and towards such things. There’s nothing to lean into. Time has no bones.

But love, in its many forms, seems to have grown in inverse correlation with the prevalent longing and lacking. We make our own odd celebrations in the warm light of our friendships. Diane and I read inaugural poetry at the sandstone church. I walked with Aristotle on the beach, and he admitted to a slight shift from despair to hope. Geoff and Joey have zoom drinks with us, unfailingly, at the start of each weekend, not that a weekend has any significance. Our writers’ group is meeting via zoom tomorrow. And sometimes we sit at the edge of an orchard as the moon begins to rise and accept the gift of a lantern.