How is it possible that you can go eight years – eight years! – without giving word; can miss a wedding, a birth, illness and heartache and celebration; can leave friends supposing you kidnapped or killed in the wilds of who-knows-where – and then walk back into their arms and into their lives, welcomed and known?
I left the velvety green hospitable plenty of the Gers behind me and climbed hairpin bends into the bleak, beautiful, half-forgotten Pyrenees. And arrived, two hours and 96 months late, to find man and boy and watchful black Labrador waiting for me at the corner, to point me down the road to where a smile about a mile across stood at the gate.
The next three days were like walking through the landscape of dream and memory. Those places you go to in your dreams that are so familiar and yet which you couldn’t place in the waking world – I wandered into them turning a corner or opening a door. And after holding my time twenty years ago in the Pyrenees and its vine-covered foothills in my head as a golden bubble of warm memories, how magical to step back into the remembered stage set and have it become real again! And to understand it differently, and see how it has moved forward in the interim.
But most amazing has undoubtedly been the experience of taking up friendships with a break of eight years and finding the connection is still there. We’re all a little older, and most of us look it; and what we do with our time together has moved on – less hanging out with the older boys and more playing pirates with a five-year-old, for instance – as has what we talk about. But the pleasure and interest and sympathy and capacity to learn from one another is right where we left it, beautiful and blessed.
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