I have had a house guest for the past ten days.  This is not the best situation for me.  I am a solitary type and when there are others around, even my husband or child, for more than a bit I become slightly frantic.  Claustrophobia grips me and my temper is short, my speech terse and unloving.  In this small house anyone but a hobbit would find themselves shrinking into a corner at the press of bodies in the kitchen, the trail of shoes at the foot of the stairs, the untidy aspect of every single room.

However, I found myself so happy in those ten days that when my friend marched into South Station, her roll-y suitcase following behind like a jaunty caboose, I was bereft.  It might be that I hadn’t seen her in eight months and genuinely missed everything about her.  Or it could be that she is as much a part of my London years as the path through St. Luke’s gardens or Portobello Road and being with her reminds me of all the years we spent together watching our children transform from toddlers to men.  At any rate, I grieved for a full day.  For me this involved a deeply unproductive morning trying to catch up on work, broken by ten minute bursts of reading.  By the afternoon, two on the dot to be precise, I was seized with a fever.  It was the first in ten years and it was awful.  I went to bed at four o’clock and didn’t emerge until the next morning at six.  And in my–literal–fever dreams, I relived our days together.

We followed very much the same schedule as we did when our children were small: a morning of lazy nibbling and tea and computer silliness followed by a long afternoon of activities.  When it rained in England, as it frequently did, my friend and I could make an activity out of anything–had to, really.  Sorting laundry became a game of tossing clothes down the stairs to our waiting kids as we sang “whites, darks, lights!”  Picking up Lego became a race as we called out “blues, reds, yellows!”  And sitting at the window watching the world go by was always accompanied by “Name that Nationality (without hearing the language).”  If we were exceedingly game, we’d go bowling and take pictures in the remarkable photo booth that could customize your portrait in the style of Van Gogh, Rembrandt or Warhol.  Imagine!

In New England we had far more edifying activities to choose from because we are grown ups, unencumbered by offspring.  One day we spent over four hours in just one wing of the Museum of Fine Arts.  At the John F. Kennedy Library we were forward-thinking enough to bring tissues so that when we wept in front of each and every exhibit we wouldn’t drip tears on the interactive instructions.  We went to Salem and toured the House of Seven Gables and Hawthorne’s birth place.  We peeked at some of the ‘witchy’ sites but were far more interested in the harbor and Customs house.  Although, both of us were horrified at the news that one accused (80-year old) male witch had been pressed to death between two doors.  It took him three agonizing days to die.  This struck us both as unbelievably tragic.  When we went looking for a bite to eat we were stymied and ended up in one of those forgotten restaurants where they post an endless menu and all you want to do is order something so obscure that they can’t possibly really make it (Fillet of Sole, Welsh Rarebit).  We declared the snack bar and it’s surrounding shops the “Mall of the Damned”.

We walked the Freedom Trail and were so undone by the South Meeting House that the docent had to come find us and shoo us out ten minutes past closing.  We strolled through Harvard Yard and marveled at its age and beauty.  Of course, my friend’s children went to Eton which was founded some 200 years before Harvard (and by Henry IV, no less) so I didn’t expect her to be in awe of old John and his college.  But she was; she was delighted by every aspect of our days together.

As we criss-crossed the busy quad we became aware that, no matter how simple it sounds, Harvard basically has two kinds of students: the beautiful boys and girls who stride along, strong, entitled, dripping a slightly watered down noblesse oblige, and the vaguely nerdy students who, no matter where they come from in the world, all carry with them the burden of hyper-intelligence.  You can see them sneaking looks at the other students, the gods and goddesses who rush by eager to get to the boathouse, to lift their shells high over their heads and then glide down the Charles like mayflies.  Fiona and I looked, too.  We made a couple of lame comments like, “Oh, there’s a good one, bet I could teach him a thing or two about how to stroke,” or “Look, look at her, she has no idea how crap she’s going to look at our age,” and, several times, “Oh, God, were we ever so young?”

I told my friend that I had once had a brief fling with a Harvard boy.  We’d been in high school together. Then we’d gone off to our respective colleges without a further thought for the other.  Sophomore year, when we were both back in New York for our Christmas break and I was recovering, not well, from being dumped, we’d fallen into each other’s arms for no particular reason.  I remembered grappling in his bathroom (he had three siblings who always seemed to be draped all over his bedroom), bracing my bare foot against the sink, scrambling for my underwear in semi-darkness.  What was I thinking?  Only a week later I would meet my future husband.  I’ve no idea where the Harvard boy ended up but I suspect he did just fine without me.

Wandering, inventing stories for passersby, leaning close to read the names on Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty bowl, weeping over dead witches and presidents, these were our activities of the past ten days.  We were as thrilled as our children had been watching a leaf swept along by the rain, finding the last tiny Lego head under the bunk bed. It occurred to me as we laughed at our own cleverness, as we raced around Target or a giant supermarket preparing to feed our family, ourselves, as we reclined at either end of a room reading, or folded laundry together at the end of the day, that there are many ways you can go home again.  Thomas Wolfe was wrong.