Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now
The Wax-Faced Doll
On a July Sunday in 1995, John and I walked down the hillside from our B&B in England's Lake
District, following the church bells to the picture-postcard village of Hawkshead. The sermon
in the ancient church that day was on friendship.
The outcome of our spiritual journeys, declared the preacher, Canon Southward, depends in
large measure on those who travel with us. He gave as examples two writers, Charles Kingsley
and Robert Burns. Asked to explain how he'd maintained his productivity over a long life,
Kingsley answered, "I had a friend." And Burns, dying of alcoholism at thirty-seven, accounted
for his self-destruction in identical words: "I had a friend."
"Friends matter!" Dr. Southward summed up. They provide guidance, for good or ill, along our
path.
A parade of faces rose before me as we climbed back up the hill. Friends who've been good
guides, others bad. And some who've been both.
One face in particular. . . Because I've come to believe that in every relationship Jesus
shows us both something of himself and something of ourselves, I want to draw the portrait of
my earliest, most problematic traveling companion. One whose influence was both healing and,
I know today, deeply harmful.
The Locket
I keep it in my dresser drawer -- a tiny leather box with a frayed satin lining. Inside the
box is an old-fashioned gold locket that opens to display two oval frames. One oval holds the
photograph of a handsome woman in her late forties standing beneath the flowering magnolia
tree in the yard of our house in Scarsdale. In my nine-year-old handwriting in the facing
oval are the words Pied de Terre.
The worn leather box, the antique locket, the not-quite-right French, sum up for me the woman
in the photo. Her name was Mea Ada Arthuretta Ivimey, and though there were nearly forty
years between our ages, she was my closest friend from early childhood until my marriage to
John.
Pied de terre -- when I took French in school, I discovered the correct phrase is
pied a terre -- was our secret password. Literally "a foothold on earth," the phrase
signified, Mea explained, one's own set-aside space.
The hideaway I sought!
It was our fantasy that when I grew up she and I would have such a place. We spent blissful
hours designing it. Sometimes our pied a terre
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