The Visit

In July a friend visited me from out west and we had a wonderful time traveling about for almost a week. After she met with a specialist in the District for some followup treatment, we played pickleball in my town and then we travelled to Maryland where we feasted on a dozen crabs in Annapolis and spent a magical three days on the Eastern Shore. We shopped for art and she bought a southwestern piece to have sent out to her apartment, we rode bicycles, enjoyed an elixir by the harbor and explored Tilghman Island.

 Next we jumped into my car and drove to Virginia where we visited a fabled postbellum hotel in Richmond. While my friend attended, in its grand lobby setting, a formal English tea which she had reserved at exorbitant cost, with some family members who naturally arrived late, I walked over to the Virginia War Museum down by the river to have a look at it and gaze at the water. When her desultory "family reunion" was concluded she called me back and we returned to Fairfax. There we hung out in our old haunts in Mosaic, saw a movie, did some shopping and partook in a happy hour at our favorite English Pub, where we each had a gin and tonic that turned to lavender from clear when we touched it. Afterwards we ate a dinner of fish cakes, shepherd's pie and had a sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

 The next day we attended a service at a nearby church of my faith which had a cool outdoor altar, cross and labyrinth that I had wanted to show her, and then she attended a service at her former church and afterwards she had lunch with her friends.

 When she picked me back up in my car late that afternoon, we drove down the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina where I dropped her off at midnight in Charlotte and drove home overnight so that she could visit with a friend there for a couple of days and then fly home.

 I had taken a photograph we both admired of a fiery sunrise on the Eastern Shore during our travels; I didn’t suspect then, being obtuse or perhaps blindly unaware, that as a result of her recent move I had somehow become merely a naive suitor of hers rather than something far closer just a short time earlier, and the picture better represented a fast approaching sunset rather than a grand burgeoning dawn.