When I Saw You This Weekend, I Remembered

We worked at the Anthropologie on 5th and Pine, it was 2005, and our first monumental conversation had something to do with our mutual love for Joan Didion. We folded tea towels and we talked about love, and suggestively sold clothing to wealthy women and picked up the piles of clothes they left behind.

We sat at the pool in the courtyard of the purple condominium on the hill (because you lived there then with your brother), and we wore our vintage 1960's Hawaiian muumuus (that matched perfectly, even though we had bought them separately).

We shopped at Ross Dress For Less in Idaho when you came to visit the first time, and you found those black Frye boots at the Goodwill in my size (I still have them even though the heels are worn to bits) and you met the person I would marry when he was working at The Fireside Restaurant in Pullman, where we ate southwest chicken salads and drank red wine.

When you came to visit the second time, we sat on the lawn in front of the Presbyterian Church across the street from my apartment, and bought tomatoes from the Farmer's Market. I wore a pale pink trench. Your hair was longer than I'd ever seen it.

Before then, when we were still in Seattle, you met the person you would marry. He wore seersucker pants to your 25th birthday party, and I knew he was yours. I took a photo of you in the green dress you wore that day, and I'd like to say it was taffeta, but I could never remember those things, and you always knew what everything was made of and exactly what shade of green.

You got married on San Juan Island in those gorgeous fawn-colored riding boots (wearing your groom's thick purple socks, because at the last minute you needed to find socks, so you made them your "something borrowed").

I got married in that little white roadside chapel on the Mt. Baker highway. Just three months before my wedding, you had a baby. She was so tiny at the wedding, but now so much bigger, and when I saw her this weekend, I couldn't stop thinking about us, about what we were like then, and what we are like now, and what extraordinary things we might teach her.