Faith

This morning, while cleaning up the coffee pot, I thought about Faith. 
 
She was the mother of an old boyfriend, a serious boyfriend who I contemplated spending the rest of my life with – in fact, there was a time when I couldn’t fathom anything different.  So, she was important to me, because her son was so important to me, but she was also a good friend, a kind and gentle person, a simple woman who longed to lead a complex and complicated life, who read books about glamorous movie stars and faraway places she always dreamed she could see. In some ways she accomplished her complicated life, although not always in the most healthy of ways.
 
What made me think about her this morning was her coffee.  She used an old percolator and a secret blend of beans that I’ve never tasted or been able to replicate before or since.  Starbucks had nothing on Faith – her coffee was so good because it was made with her special touch. 
 
But it went beyond just the rich dark brew she cooked up in her old percolator; it was the ritual surrounding the coffee that made it so special.  We would sit at the kitchen table in her home in Maine – first the big house, then the smaller condo – and we would talk and talk and solve all the world’s problems.  She would often invite her friend Fran over to join us.  Fran was a beautiful woman, married to a pilot for big commercial airline who was away much of the time, and Fran always had interesting stories to tell in her quiet, unpretentious way.  Fran loved to read and always had a good book to share.  Like Faith, she was a gentle soul, and the two were fast friends.  I felt privileged to be able to share coffee and their company when I was visiting.
 
Often Bill would join us for coffee.  He was a kind and steady person when he was in Maine, a far cry from the wild and ambitious party boy I lived with in NYC.  He was able to find his footing there with his mother, with his friends, perhaps remember his foundation a bit before he was off and running again in the fast-lane of the big city.  Faith came to visit us a few times in NYC – a fish out of water, to be sure, and horrified by the filth in the taxicabs.  Despite her dreams of the complex and glamorous life that eluded her, she was a Mainer through and through, and even talked of moving North to Nova Scotia to escape the tourists that were fast encroaching on her beloved Southern Maine with every passing summer.
 
This photograph of an old sundial in Faith’s yard in York, Maine embodies so much of her and how I remember her.  A piece of the past, a remnant of both old-world elegance and the simplicity of a time gone by that may never return.  The shards of light were purely accidental, as this photo was captured with an old instamatic camera in the early 1980s – no doubt, divine intervention, perhaps a soul that understood I would look at this photo some forty years later and reminisce about where I was and what I was feeling that cold wintery afternoon in Southern Maine, a place so different, so wonderful and yes, so magical to a young girl from PA.
 
Perhaps, just perhaps, that soul is Faith.