Permanent Things
Playing Pretend

by Emily Stimpson

You are reading this in July, or perhaps, some later month. But I am writing it on a fine morning in April. The sun is shining, the grass growing green, and all the pink flowering trees—some of God’s loveliest gifts to man—bursting with blooms. Also on this morning, my house is full of guests and I am playing pretend.

I am pretending that I am not a busy writer with deadlines looming, editors waiting, and interviews pending. I am pretending that my house does not need painting, my faucet fixing, or my grass mowing. In this pretend world, there are no bills to be paid, and I am a lady of leisure, enjoying the company of my friends and their children, who have traveled across the country to be with me.

The fact that I am very much enjoying my guests is, of course, quite real. My two best friends have traveled from Washington and Michigan, each with a baby in tow, to spend two precious weeks with me. Their husbands will soon join us.

Yesterday, on the eighth day of the visit, I awoke to the laughter of a 15-month-old baby boy—blonde, brown-eyed, and bow-legged. He had a hug and a dozen-plus kisses for me. After breakfast, we drove to a nearby town, full of shops, pretty homes, and stunning churches. We wandered in and out of stores, purchasing stationary and several pieces of antique china. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch, popped into the Catholic church for a few moments of prayer, then received a surprising gift from one of the last shopkeepers we visited—a handful of long-stemmed pink roses, full and fat. In the evening we cooked dinner, sipped wine, and danced with the babies. It was, almost, a perfect day.

Today there may be no gifts of roses, but there will be more kisses and much conversation. The men are also set to arrive, but their appearance won’t alter the temporary pattern of life we’ve established here. After I’ve fed them, other friends’ husbands will come knocking. The men will play cards, smoke pipes on the porch, and leave us mostly to ourselves. Which is fine by us.

There will, of course, be parties this weekend—cookouts and brunches and other such festivities with more friends and many more children. There will also be more dishes to wash than I like to think about. All the pretending in the world can’t conjure up the servants who once made house parties like this truly leisurely.

Minus the servants, however, these weeks seem like scenes stolen from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Those were the days before text messaging, before email, before phone calls. There were no planes, trains, or automobiles to hurtle people from one destination to the next. There were also no “time-saving” modern conveniences—no washing machines, dishwashers, or vacuums, no supermarkets, drive-throughs, or shopping malls.

Food was grown in the backyard (or at least at a local farm), clothes made and mended at home, rugs beaten on the back porch. Ships and coaches were the only mode of travel, and letters the only means by which separated friends kept in touch. But there were fewer of those then. Most people stayed where they were planted, not resettling themselves every few years into new homes, new communities, new groups of friends.

And yet many of those who did transplant themselves found ways to maintain old ties, mostly through lengthy letters and visits very much like the one I’m enjoying at this moment.

We may manage to do the same, and these visits might continue through the years. Perhaps one day I’ll watch children of my own play under pink flowering branches with the children of the far-off friends, while I sit on the porch with their parents, talking about art and politics, wine and catechetics, paint colors and Agatha Christie.

But I’m not sure this post-modern modern world will let us.

I’m not sure that all our world’s means of saving time, keeping in touch, and traveling from coast to coast won’t, in the end, prove more a hindrance than help in keeping us together. I’m not sure that our love for and enjoyment of each other is stronger than the frenetic busyness into which the culture propels us. I’m not sure that lasting friendship can exist in a world that seeks to make all things disposable and replaceable.

But we pretend it can. In these blessed days, we talk with the utmost certainty about future visits, future children playing together, future moments stolen from the chaos of our everyday lives. We talk as if visits will never cost too much, as if business and Little League and laundry will never trump springtime rambles and backyard barbeques.

As we talk I pray. I pray for the grace to savor every precious moment in this day. And I pray that by grace all our plans become more than just pretend.

Stimpson writes from Steubenville, Ohio. A contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor, she has also appeared in First Things, Touchstone, Franciscan Way, the National Catholic Register, Lay Witness, Faith & Family, and elsewhere. Before moving to Steubenville, Stimpson worked in Washington, DC, as special assistant to former Attorney General Edwin Meese, III, at The Heritage Foundation, and as legislative assistant to then-Congressman Jim Talent (R-MO).

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