In high school, I used to go out with my guy friends and just talk. You couldn’t call them dates, as I was never really romantically involved with any of the six guys I considered my best friends. But I could be found with one of them nearly every weekend, going out to dinner, grabbing a granita at the Ground Floor, driving around in Jon’s green Grand Am or listening to Ross King in Adam’s truck.
My sister and her friends ran in a herd (they still do), and they’d descend on people’s houses in groups of twelve or fifteen, or go to the movies, or to a birthday party. Betsy always had a ready answer when my parents asked, “So what did y’all do?”. I would usually shrug and say, “We just…talked.” And I loved it that way.
I did the same thing in college, first with Tori and Joy and Jenness, then with the whole crew in Oxford, then after we got back with the House 9 girls and Bethany and Jeremiah, spending hours discussing life and love, faith and Broadway musicals, great books like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the Harry Potter series. (You know. The important stuff.) People usually, if not always, had time for long, lazy conversations that seemed to skim the surface but in reality often went deep.
I do that less often since I’ve entered the working world. My days are blocked off from 8-5; I do have wonderful lunches with Julie and other friends, but even those sometimes seem a bit rushed. At ladies’ coffee night, we all try to talk as fast and listen as hard as we can, which is fabulous. But I’d felt that space – that space to simply be with one another and shoot the breeze – missing in other areas of my life.
Then, on Friday night, we headed over to Morgan’s new house for her 20th birthday party, which included chivitos, two kinds of birthday cake, a spirited round of Rock Band, and playing backyard volleyball with a soccer ball (yes, my arms hated me the next day). After most people left, though, Lawson, Morgan, Ben, Jeremiah and I sat around the back patio table, the wind keeping the mosquitoes off, and drank mate and talked for…I don’t know. At least another hour. Nobody had anywhere to be and we didn’t worry about saying the wrong thing, or getting the conversation off track, or running out of time. We just talked, and man, did it feel good.
The best conversations are the ones you couldn’t transcribe if you wanted to, or even remember most of by the next day – but that are still indescribably rich. Friday night’s was definitely one of those, and it brought home how much I’ve been missing them.
Here’s to “just talking” more often this summer.
cakes, tea and dreams 
Yay. What are chivitos?
I remember sitting and talking with you for HOURS at Houst 9! In the kitchen, on the porch, in my room…wherever! I came across an entry from my journal written in either junior or senior year, where I asked, “What is it about Katie Noah that makes you want to tell her all of your secrets?”
I miss “just talking” too. 🙂
I so enjoyed reading this post about a moment you are savoring right here and now. I love your beautiful “memory posts” so much. The images are so rich I almost feel like I have experienced those moments with you. But, I have to confess that I have been wishing for a description of something you are in right now—this very minute—to go along with the memories. I am inspired by people who savor the moment. You do that so well.
You are such a wonderful conversationalist. I will miss coffee night with you when you move on to the next phase of your life. Maybe then you can write a “memory post” about the sights and smells of coffee night in beautiful memory form. I look forward to reading that one. It will take me back to the way it was. Because things just won’t be the same without you there.
Jana