The following experience is not how I do things, but there’s an odd sweetness & humor to this story. Plus, you can’t take things like this personally. You gotta laugh.
• • •
Hosta starting to grow in the stones underneath the deck, early spring.
I got an email from someone, let’s call her Pebbles, who I last heard from when I was in my 20s.
Pebbles had gotten my email address from someone on FB who knew where I was. I’m not on FB, but Pebbles was looking for me because, as she explained in her email, she wanted to re-connect with me.
To be my friend again.
Pebbles’s email was filled to the brim with newsy tidbits about her blessed life as the wife of a successful businessman and her role as a granny of a parcel of fabulous little ones and her passion, which was either going to the beach or playing golf.
I can’t remember which.
Surprised, but happy to engage, I replied to Pebbles’s email asking a few questions about that which she had told me and sharing a few details about what was going in our lives now.
• • •
The other day I got a reply to my reply to Pebbles’s email.
In it she answered my questions about her life and commented on my life. Like a friend might do, right?
But here’s the thing that makes this communication exchange odd– and like none other that I have had.
Pebbles replied back to me, using the email that she’d initially sent to me and I’d replied back to her on; that’s normal enough. HOWEVER, her response came five years after I wrote back to her.
Yes, I said years.
Not five months. Not five weeks. Not five days. Not five hours.
Five years.
• • •
Knowing me as you do, my gentle readers, you can imagine that my inner Nancy Drew is curious.
Questions abound: where the frostbite has Pebbles been for five years? Do I want to know?
And why did she keep my response email for five years? If she wanted to get back in touch again, why didn’t she start a new email to me– like, you know, people do?
And what prompted her to think of me to begin with? I’d really like to know the answer to that question.
• • •
Nut shells discarded by squirrels on the stones, late winter.
So here’s my plan.
I’ll follow Pebbles’s lead and reply back to her recent email… in five years. I’ll ask the above questions.
Then when she responds back to me, presumably in another five years, I’ll tell you what she says in answer to the above questions. In fact, you, my gentle readers, will be the first to know after me.
Because I have no doubt that ten years hence we’ll all still be here reading and commenting on each other’s blogs. We bloggers are a reliable group of people who tend to live in the moment. We like to keep things current.
But as Pebbles has shown me, not everyone does.
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 