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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Sharing A Time, A Place And Dreams

Eileen Mcnamara The Boston Globe

Theirs is a friendship forged in farewells.

Three women, strangers but for their ties to a fourth, spent a weekend together two summers ago to launch their mutual friend into a new phase of midlife.

A New England native, she was heading West with her family in a move her friends alternately hailed as bold and feared as foolish.

She did not have to go. No job waited. No family called. She chose change for the simple promise of possibility or maybe just for the confirmation that choices still exist past 40.

Her friends were in transition, too, that summer. Their individual choices were as different as their collective angst was alike. One was leaving the corporate world for her new husband, her adolescent son and the volunteer work she’d never before had time to do. Another was returning to her old job after a brief, conflicted hiatus. The third was toying with the paints and brushes she had set aside back home in Colorado when her daughters were young.

None was as sure of herself that hot, humid weekend as the woman who’d already packed for the trip West. The rest shared a suspicion of instant intimacy, but perhaps because they did not know one another well, they were able to confide their fears.

For two days, swatting mosquitoes on the deck at dusk or strolling across the causeway at low tide, they asked themselves and each other what they wanted out of midlife.

Over coffee in the morning and wine in the evening, they admitted being frightened of making the wrong choices in a way they had not been frightened at age 20 or age 30, when so much time and so many choices lay ahead.

The artist among them was as afraid not to paint again as she was fearful of actually renting studio space in their suburban town’s surplus schoolhouse. To make the commitment was to risk failure. To refuse was to surrender a piece of herself that felt only dormant, not dead.

The corporate executive feared vanishing into domestic life. She would consult for a while, testing the formula until she found the right balance in her commitment to family and work, and community. She would have plenty of time for her son; she would make time to plant a garden.

The woman returning to her old desk in her old office feared that going back meant going backwards. Would there be less time to watch her children grow? When would she ever learn to cook? Could she go back and move forward at the same time?

Women expect a lot of friendship - a thoughtful, empathetic ear - but rarely do they expect answers. It was enough that for one weekend four women listened to one another and, in each other’s stories, heard the echo of her own.

They expected to be fast friends after they drove north across the Bourne Bridge, leaving Cape Cod. There would be pot luck suppers and regular evenings out. They would be one another’s sounding boards. Their beach house weekend would become an annual event, a yearly pulse taking.

Of course, that is not the way it worked out. Life intervenes. It was too far to come, too complicated to arrange, too difficult to replicate that moment in time. But the memory of that weekend became a tie that bound them, that made them cheer one another as each settled into the changes she’d made.

The corporate executive does not feel compelled to consult as much as she did that first summer. This summer, her garden smells of freshly turned earth. The new weeping cherry, and her son, are thriving.

The artist returned to her easel, her reluctance retreating as she painted through the suburban Boston winters as she once had through the seasons in the Colorado Rockies. She withheld from her friends news of a gallery exhibit, but slowly began to show them her work: pastel watercolors suffused with sunlight, still lifes full of whimsy.

Three of her paintings hang in the home of the woman who went back to her job, but not backwards in her life. When she doubts her own choices, she contemplates the blank canvases she would own if the painter had been too afraid to paint.

Last weekend, the women gathered once more, this time to say goodbye to their artist friend. Her return to painting helped clarify a need to return home. She and her family will now head back to Colorado, to a house with mountain views, to a studio with morning sun.

For the women who have come to say farewell, it is another rare moment in time to celebrate the promise of change.

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