Last week I was at my best friends lake house and we sat in the sun room at the end of the day drinking the brandy old fashioned's that I adopted from my years in Wisconsin.
It was a delight. Two women who met in 1993 as newly engaged, bright eyed young women who were in some kind of misguided internal race to become married, now sat at 55 and 56 remembering. Neighbors in a place where neighbors got you through the long stretches of winter when you were practically snowed under, or with whom you sat on the porch during the summer lobster BBQ on the front lawn and laughed your drunk assess off as people ran from the rain.
She and I have long decided that it was we who were the prizes to be won and not the men we had married. To be sure, we love them - but we are the bedrock of our families. We were the prizes. We just didn't know it at 21 and 22.
We try to spend a week together, relatively alone with one another. I spent my week working on the Fat fish rug. It's a present for her and I was hoping to finish while I was there. Its cold in the mornings on Bow Lake in September. I would wake up late - 9:30 or 10:30am, all cuddled up in my blankets. She would have already started working and I could hear her but it never bothered me.
I'd wander down, brush teeth, wash face, and get my small breakfast. I'd head out to the sun porch to see the lake, greeting an old friend. This lake where I was a new bride and a new mom. This lake where I dipped a new born Emily's feet, and later taught her to swim - and to be calm and collected around water, just in case. Living with a lake outside of your front door means you don't fuck around in teaching your child water safety. No child proof fences on the shore.
Some days I'd lay on the dock and dangle my feet in the water. It's quiet on the water this time of year. Sometimes the loons call, but mostly it's water, wind and lapping waves. I like to think that the lake tastes my skin and remembers me.
I would make bohemian lunches - cut vegetables, cheese, a fresh peach and crackers and hand them through her office door while I would meander some more satisfying my own strange and inexplicable eating jags. She doesn't even question it anymore. Before I get there she will say "Anything I need to buy?". I never let her. I am so particular about foods, and also not fussy at all. I am my own odd waterfowl.
In the afternoon, I yell upstairs and ask when she wants dinner ready as I know my friend has work hours that do not match mine at all. That being said, I am entirely content in silence, or watching my Korean dramas. Given my job, I crave silence in the not at work times.
Later, drinks in hand, we talk about life, and children, and work, and spouses, and extended family. With a friendship this long, there is frequently no preamble needed. We know the characters, we have the shorthand. We laugh. We tell each other things we would only ever tell each other. We will take those things to the grave. We may cry a little as we talk about caring for our aging parents and the things we never knew we would have to do. We both picture those 21 and 22 year old women and what we couldn't know.
I tell her that sometimes I wish I could go back to that Dawn and Jess and tell them how beautiful and amazing they are. Tell them how they will be comfortable, middle aged women who spend weeks in beach houses and lake houses and drink brandy old fashioneds.
I want to go to Dawn and have the body I had at 21 - absolutely gorgeous and free from health bullshit. Yeah, there were some glimmers of the mental health challenges coming - but nothing beyond some mild depression. She did not see the big trains in the distance. She could not imagine that her organs would fail her, literally.
I want to go to that Dawn, but have my 56 year old brain. I want to give absolute no fucks about worrying if I was pretty enough, thin enough, worthy enough. I want to walk into spaces and know that I am the shit. I want to tell her that yes, catastrophe will come and the world will fall apart but she will always eventually stand back up. She will hate the man she married, and then she will fall back in love with him. She will hate motherhood, but always love her daughter, even as her daughter forces her to grapple with her own mothering. That daughter will make her laugh and also read her for filth later in life.
The absolute gift of being menopausal and 56 is deciding to live my life as I want.
I say to Jess "Yes, I would like to be 21, but with my brain now."
"Would you though?"
Maybe not. This body was hard won and this brain was even harder. This brain knows the impossibility of the gray in life, of love that is not romantic, and of the longevity of a friendship in which you can tell something that you would never tell anyone else. This body knows the birth of a child, health problems that knocked her off her feet, and the joy of menopause. Seriously. I love it.
At night I listen to the loons calling to each other, staring up at the post and beam ceiling of the very old lake house. I wink at 21 year old Dawn. She looks at me and sees an older lady who can't tell her fuck-all. I wink at her again, and hold up my brandy old fashioned in salute.
