Vitamin Friendship

The drawer is shabby. No matter how often I organize it, my spices, laid on their backs like so many patients awaiting operations, look askance at me when I peek in. They are akimbo - the Garlic lies diagonal to the Oregano, which sits haphazardly next to the Dill, which looks perpetually angry. I really should own a spice rack, but my counters are cluttered enough. And besides - if I had a spice rack, my special notes from my friend wouldn't seem quite so much like hidden treasure.

You see, these notes rescue my spice drawer. They make me smile whenever I open it. Tucked away - between the edge of the drawer and the Parsley, perhaps - I'll often find a new little note from my friend. Some notes are silly. Some contain hope. Rarely, there'll be a note of tears. But each of them holds a measure of my friend's love, and that is why they make me smile.

The notes are usually white. Thus, secreted among the earthy tones of my spices and the vibrant colors of their packaging, they stand out like little flags. Flags of surrender, of peace.

It has taken much for this friendship to forge. My friend and I are, on the surface, far more different than we are alike. But as time has progressed, we've come to see our similarites - to treasure them as equally precious alongside the things that make us unique.

And now, now I have a new note to add to my collection. I read it a week ago, and its words haunt me still. "Nothing is forever," my friend wrote in this note. "It would be foolish of me to assume this friendship could go on forever." No, she did not want to dissolve the relationship we have built - she merely wanted to take out an insurance policy, in her words. Wanted to inform me that no matter what happened, I would always have her love.

And while this gesture is sweet - it also leaves me sad. How poignant to think of friendships like this - as things that cannot be guaranteed. They, like the spices with which we enhance our foods, are the things that give our life the most flavor.

And then - there it is. Flavor. While this friendship may not last a lifetime (who knows what quirks time and chance have in store?), its flaovr can never be forgotten. I will live the rest of my life having been forever changed by my friend. Regardless of how long our friendship lasts, my present and future always contain the echo of my friend's existence, her love.

And this is the beauty of it. These spice notes, yes. They are an insuranc policy. A gift. And yet also, they are just what they remind me of: Little flags of surrender. With each note she leaves me, with each note I send back for her, my friend and I surrender another portion of our pre-friendship life - turning over more of ourselves to be flavored by this shared experience. I am grateful. I am honored. And I am anxioius to see, with each passing year, how we will flavor each other's futures. Some day, when we smile from the warm shelter of eternity back on our cold years on earth, we will recognize that this existence prepared us for the one to come After - that all our gestures of love, of sisterhood, of surrender, were flavoring far more than our few years on earth.

And with that in mind, I can truly say that I believe my friend and I will be forever friends. With this life as the beginning, and eternity ahead ... Forever is a reality, after all.

Somehow, I think there will be spice drawers in Forever - don't you?