Family Friends and Deer at Dusk

Hi Friend,

Sorry I haven’t written: May was full, with a housemate moving, visitors and traveling. I’ve also had a cold, and have recently been working to a deadline.

The cold has technically been over for two weeks but has left me with a weak voice, a phantom heaviness in my chest, and a lack of life force I’ve named the “under-tired.”

(This term is inspired by Rosemary’s Baby, when Rosemary eats Mrs. Castevet’s special dessert and complains of an “under-taste,” which her husband tells her is not a thing, although of course it totally is.) The under-tired does not keep me from doing stuff, but makes all the stuff harder to do. It’s manageable, but a drag.

The deadline means I’ve spent the last week either at my computer or wandering around the house with my head in the clouds while my brain forces its way through enough actions and reactions to make a plot for a writing project I’m working on.

When doing this kind of brain-work, it is dangerous to switch tracks, even to write a letter. But in the back of my mind I’ve cradled a warm glow of memory with the intention to share it with you—of our week-long trip to Texas.

In Texas, we visited my uncle and saw other friends, but our main impetus for the trip was to see a particular set of family friends. They are “family friends” not because our families know them, but because Paul and I are friends with the whole family. When we lived in Australia, Roylynn and her husband, Mac, worked at “the base” with Paul. Roylynn and I belonged to the same book club and to a casual group that got together with our guitars and assorted instruments on the weekends. She was also the person in our neighborhood who appreciated taking destination-less walks along the long road leading into our neighborhood.

Mac and Roylynn’s son, Alex, attended and finished high school during the four years we lived there. When I had cancer and decided to eat many organic vegetables, he dug up our whole back yard and planted a garden. Unbelievably, Alex is forty now, and his sister, Amy, who we’ve become close to over the years, has children the age Alex was when we met. Amy and Alex both live in Austin, and Mac and Roylynn have retired to a house near a lake about an hour away.

On the family-friends portion of our trip, we spent our first evening dining out with “the kids” at a popular restaurant in Austin, then drove out to Mac and Roylynn’s. We arrived after they’d gone to bed. There’s a lovely comfort in knowing someone well enough to do this. We let ourselves in, the dogs didn’t bark. The Dove chocolates were in the cut glass bowl on the foyer table like always. We passed the comfy leather couch and heavy wood dining table on the way downstairs to “our” room. It was nice to know that in the morning, we would find our friends making coffee in the kitchen and would have the whole day ahead of us.

Highlights of the trip were a pizza and game night with all three generations, visiting Alex’s new job that is perfect for him, and the time spent just hanging out. On our last night, Roylynn and I went for a walk just as dusk was falling and the heat-wave temperature was beginning to drop.

In Australia, when kangaroos used to hop across our path it would remind me of deer back home. On this night it was the opposite.

Any summer plans or trips in the future on your end?

Warmly,

Barrington