When I was in kindergarten, I met a girl named Sara on the playground. She was in first grade, and I don’t remember how we became friends, but I do know we were close from that day on. She’s the first friend I ever remember making.
A few months after we met, my mom and I were driving home on a Thursday evening. This was when I saw Sara outside in her yard for the first time, even though I didn’t know it was her yard at first. I know it was a Thursday, though, because she was sitting clothes outside for a yardsale her family was having the next day, and the Hall family has always had yardsales on Fridays and Saturdays.
I remember seeing Sara and screaming as loudly as I could and begging my mom to pull into their driveway. Which, turned out, was less than half a mile from where I live. As the sun was setting, we stood outside of my mom’s blue Oldsmobile and talked. Our moms really liked each other. Sara and I really liked each other. We were walking distance apart. It was perfect.
We made plans to go over to each other’s houses, and I don’t remember the first time that happened, but I know we spent entire summers together. And weekends. And days after school - so many that our bus driver stopped requiring me to bring a note from my mom whenever I wanted to get off the bus at her house.
I have a paper journal from elementary school that we had to write in every day - one of those journals with dull paper and fat lines - and one of the entries says, “Today I waved at Peggy (Sara’s mom) from the bus window. Nicole waved at her too and that made me mad.” I don’t remember who Nicole is now, but I do remember feeling like Sara - and her mom and her house and her dogs - all belonged to me, too. I didn’t want to share.
We stayed best friends all through middle school. We went to skating rinks together, and she loved to embarrass me in front of boys. We did each other’s make-up and shared our clothes. We spent entire nights singing Dixie Chicks karaoke even though neither of us could sing. We had the same life plans: to graduate high school, find a husband, and have babies. We both loved babies. And we didn’t know there were any other options.
We ended up going to different high schools, though. I went to the Early College, and she went to the school I would’ve went to had I not decided against it. I still went over to her house for dinner quite a bit - it was always homegrown and never from a box or a can - but things were never quite the same, even though I can’t place how. It simply seemed as if we existed in different worlds. And in a lot of ways, going to such different schools, we did.
The one constant that held all our years together was her backyard. Her family lives on one-hundred acres of pure glory: of tobacco fields (they roll their own cigarettes, too), cherry trees, orange clay, wild strawberries, huckleberries, deer stands, old barns, and miles and miles of trees. In elementary school, we’d climb the trees and play hide and seek and track the orange clay into our houses. In middle school and high school we’d do the same - sometimes just because, and sometimes so Sara could smoke without anyone seeing.
Every summer we’d catch frogs and fireflies. And then we’d go back into our houses, covered in mosquito bites and briar scratches.
Tonight on my way home from college, I went over to their house for the first time in a few years, and almost nothing had changed. The house still smells the same, like smokey meat and wood stove, and Sara’s brother still picks up their old telephone every time it rings. He still answers it saying, “hello, Hall’s residence.” One would think time skipped over their little house the way nothing ever changes there, not even Days of Our Lives playing perpetually on the television set.
A few things have changed, though. Sara doesn’t live there anymore, for one. She’s now engaged, living with her fiance, and just visiting with her mother for the evening. And the biggest change, my personal favorite, is the addition of a human: a little red-headed girl named Dixie. Sara had grown Dixie inside of her belly for nine months, and she has now existed in the world, in our tiny town in North Carolina, for five months.
Sara’s dad didn’t even get mad when he found out about the baby, although Sara’s only one year older than me. “The worst thing about being a grandfather,” he apparently said, “is waking up next to a grandmother.”
As I was pulling into the driveway, I was thinking, “Please remember all those years in high school when I babysat regularly. Please remember that I know how to hold a baby, that I’ll know how to support her head if I need to, and that I won’t drop her.” I know some parents are picky about who they’ll let hold their children (I would be one of those parents), and I just wanted Sara to remember that she could trust me.
When I got inside, the baby was asleep on the couch. I was disappointed, as most baby-lovers would be, because usually this means no holding the baby until the baby wakes up. I was surprised when Peggy, Dixie’s grandmother, immediately asked if I wanted to hold her. They woke Dixie up and handed her right to me, not even lecturing me on the importance of not dropping her.
She was the happiest baby in the world, even after being woken up from a nap. She pulled my hair and laughed and reminded me so much of her mom. Even though it’s still weird to think of Sara as a mother, despite all the years we spent playing with dolls together.
After Dixie was napping again and we’d ran out of stories to tell, Sara asked if I wanted to go outside with her. She snuck a cigarette from her pocketbook and told her mom we’d be back soon. Outside she showed me where wild strawberries were growing and we ate them straight from the earth, without washing them, just as we’d always done as children.
“Watch out and don’t step on a snake,” she told me, noticing my sandals. I’d always been bad for dressing inappropriately for our walks through her woods. I had collected a drawer full of Sara’s old clothes at my house at one point, just because I never learned not to wear my good clothes when I knew we’d be outside.
“But then again,” she said, “I’ve never found any snakes on this property before.”
“Never?” I was surprised. All those acres and all that time spent outside, surely there had been a snake. But it turns out Sara doesn’t count black snakes, just the bad ones like copperheads and rattlesnakes.
And after we walked to the one-lane bridge and back to her porch, instead of calling my dad to tell him I was ready to go, Sara drove me home herself - with her own car and an empty Graco car seat in the back.
