If I had a flower every time I thought of you. . . I could walk through my garden forever.
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

Throughout my life, I’ve been blessed with a garden of best friends. Brilliant blossoms, each one of them. And how much richer, how much lighter my life has been because I’ve taken counsel from and found refuge in them. Tennyson is so right: if I had a flower each time I thought of these friends, I could walk through my garden forever.

In Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved (1987), Sixo, a slave at Sweet Home plantation offers his feelings about a woman he walked 30 miles to see:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Someone who gathers up all your messy pieces and gives them back in the right order, who is a friend of your mind, is a best friend, indeed. In some of the lowest points in my life, I can recall the remarkable comfort of knowing that my friend would gently put me back together again. Because she knew me–my past, my dreams, my mind. My best friendships have always been open invitations, guarantees that the door would always be open and compassion just a phone call away. How do you measure such gifts?

And when a child becomes a young woman, when she evolves from one being cared for into one who cares, this is a friendship blossom of rare distinction. My granddaughter, Gracyn, will turn twelve in a few weeks. For eleven years, she has been my granddaughter, but recently, I’ve come to know her also as a best friend.

How do I measure this gift? I hope that I’ll have years to walk through this garden, for each bloom here is more extraordinary than the next.

 
 Why I Am Without Words
         --for Gracyn
  
 Rooted to the kitchen floor, I stand before you
 as sobs crash against your tight-lipped resolve,
 your tongue useless to stay the flow
 of something dark and cold that rises within
 and threatens to undo you.
  
 I’m leaving for three weeks,
 and you’ve just helped me load my suitcases for the trip. 
 We can’t bear to look at each other,
 and shoulder to shoulder as we close the car door,
 we quake, our fragile souls quiver.
 It’s not for long, I say, just a couple weeks.
 But the March wind seizes my words 
 and whips them away like chaff.
  
 Today, you’ve sent me a photo of the hyacinth
 blooming in my garden.
 Because I know you were waiting for them to bloom, you say,
 because they might die before you get back.
 Miles away, you think of how I’ve waited for these first blossoms
 and how I might be missing you as much as you miss me.
 Best friends do such things.
 For eleven years, you’ve been my granddaughter,
 but now—
  
 Now, I’m without words.
 I have no language to speak this mercurial joy that washes over me
 each time I think of you thinking of me.
 What can I say but that the blossoms here are lovely enough;
 that time crawls on as it must;
 and that even if all the hyacinth wither and die,
 my best friend is watching the road
 waiting for me to come home.