Ellen read a lovely and heartbreaking essay at our Beaux Arts Party last week. I asked her to send along the whole piece so everyone out there in the blogosphere can enjoy it.

Dear Kiki:

As I sit on this rickety, metal-spined office chair trying to get comfortable so I can write, you, whom I have known and loved without the tiniest break since the day I met you, are struggling to find just a few pain-free moments from your wheelchair in a rehabilitation hospital four states away.

I ache to see you. To put my arms around you. To hand-deliver flowers and sushi. To massage your feet. To sit beside you and listen to whatever you want to say, or not.

I want to clean your house. Take your boys to the movies.

Oh the things we are drawn to do out of friendship, deep and long. For the ones we met on the seventh grade camping trip when it rained all weekend, forcing us to reposition our damp sleeping bags in just the right spot under a dripping nylon tarp; the sticky moisture attaching us to one another and bonding us over shared discomfort.

Just like now. Uncomfortable.

For the past few weeks, for as long as you’ve been sick, you have been declining my offers to board a plane and come to your side. I make reservations and then I break them. You say it’s all you can do to get through your rehabilitation and spend time with your boys, sisters, mother and husband. You’ve been through hell and only now are beginning to recover some strength.  You say you need time to process and that you will call me when you are ready.

Come later, you say, when I’ll need you more.

I understand, of course. It makes sense. But since you got sick, nothing is staying sensible for very long.  This came over you suddenly and turned your life upside down - what’s logical about that? I hate that I can’t do anything for you. Every muscle in my body wants to act. Isn’t through our actions that we show love?

I want to bake. Weed your garden. Make a casserole (even though I never made one before.)

Other than praying, which offers some solace and temporary calm, as your heartbroken, out-of-town friend, what can I do with all of my doing energy?

I send cards and compact discs, poetic verses and comedy DVDs, and a turquoise cashmere shawl.

And for a day or two, it feels like something.

A few weeks into this out-of-state but so in-my-sights crisis, on a whim, while in a flower shop where I consider sending you flowers, I bring home an orchid.

It is, in every respect, uncharacteristic.  You know I’m not gifted with plants. That’s your gift. I have never bought an orchid, nor has anyone given me one (as this is known about me.). It’s so delicate. Intimidating. And, as I soon learn, so high maintenance. It’s purple and fuchsia – two-thirds bloomed – and, absolutely stunning. The shop owner tells me to give it plenty of water, which is good because too much water is how I’ve been killing plants my whole non-plant nurturing life.

I water it as advised and place it by the sunniest window in the house. Later, I move it to another spot. I position it on surfaces where it can show off it’s purple- and-fuchsia-ness, it’s many-gestured self. It’s more work than I ever have put into a houseplant, but it has my heart. I tell it how beautiful it is; it bats its blossoms back at me; it positively prances. The orchid is flourishing under my care and love, the dual package I’ve been aching to give to you. I’m slathering it all on the orchid. And it’s beginning to show. On us both.

You know how it must be. You, the landscape architect, with the gift of knowing how to take living things and installing them so that they thrive in a new setting.

Like I think I’ve done with this orchid.

Patience, I tell myself. Patience for not being able to do for you in tangible or traditional ways. Patience in the knowledge that when you leave the hospital and retransplant yourself into your home, that I will, eventually, be there to help nourish you, like a hothouse flower unfurling itself in the sun.

Love,
Keek

This essay was adapted from “The Orchid” published in Views from the Home Office Window by Ellen Blum Barish. (Adams Street Publishing, 2007)

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