my friends are florists

they water & cry & bloom & sleep

I’m flying back from a visit with my two college roommates in Crested Butte, CO.¹ It has been at least 20 years since the three of us spent time together, but that interval compressed and stretched as found each other again, and it took no time at all for us to fall into old ways of interacting, talking together and asking questions, laughing.

Call it three decades, though our knowing each another stretches back a hair longer. One was my previously unknown, assigned roommate for freshman year, and the other lived on a different floor in our dorm. I ended up in some configuration with the two of them – both named Amy, spelled differently but for simplicity here I’m maintaining just Amy – every year of my four years there. I was, in fact, beset by Amys.

I'd been to Colorado twice before with them, in our twenties. Once, we hiked the Maroon Bells of Aspen and went rafting. We visited Rocky Mountain National Park and it was the first time I'd seen those western peaks and knew the rush of high mountain air. The next time, an Amy was marrying her college boyfriend and all her young women friends donned champaign-silk bridesmaids' dresses to help celebrate them.

Since that long-ago event, Amy and her husband spent 20 years in Denver after some time in other places. She became a mother, a psychologist, and a best-selling author. The other Amy lived in the Pacific Northwest and has led…I cannot say it any other way…a life of adventure. She is a medical professional who treks all over the world, has lived in New Zealand, and now is building a house in Crested Butte.

Both of the Amys are in excellent physical shape, active and deliberate about it, tanned and toned, while my slow slide toward menopause and more heavy foods than I should eat scooped me right into self-consciousness and self-doubt. I mentioned a few times my concern about hiking near 10,000 feet combined with added weight and a lack of having pushed myself much yet this year. All the same, I wanted to hike with them. I could see stunning yellow wildflowers that looked like Montana’s arrowleaf balsamroot and fields of lupine on the hillsides of Crested Butte, and I wanted to walk on those hillsides.

Columbine at 9200’.

On our first full day together we embarked up a long green valley. I asked the Amy who lives there how long a hike it was. She told me, “Three hours. I don’t know the mileage.” Anyone who has ever moved any distance and thought about it, knows that “3 hours” could be 3 miles, or 6 miles, or 9 miles. But no matter. We marched along the upper loop of a Sound of Music-esque trail and spied the classic Colorado vista of white-boned aspens framing a shining river underneath stunning snow-capped peaks. I snapped photos of columbine and the yellow flowers that turned out not to be arrowleaf, spotted some phenomenal orange trumpet-blossoms and heard a yellow warbler or two. As the minutes turned to hours though, my binoculars clunked against my sternum and dust swirled around my boots. The trail did not seem to have a terminus.

Finally, Amy said, “This is a little longer than I thought, but the trail goes up the valley about 20 more minutes and then loops back. Do you want to keep going or turn around?” It felt like this question was directed at me, so I announced with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, “Definitely keep going!” And hoped she wasn’t underestimating the time. The truth was, my feet were blistering and my legs were screaming. I had worn normally-comfortable minimalist hiking boots, but the soles of my feet were unaccustomed to spending that long in such close contact with a rocky ground. I knew one Amy was starting to keep an eye on me as she looked over her shoulder when I stopped to swig some water or listen to a bird, affording a brief rest.

The trail hairpinned and began to descend, and finally we arrived at a riverside bench with a stunning view of the unnamed peaks (Collegiates? Backside of the Maroon Bells? Snowmass? Nobody knows) and sat there for about 10 minutes. The relief to my feet and to my back, which had also begun to hurt with the descent, was instantaneous and overwhelming. That expansive range of whitecapped fourteeners in front of us perfectly balanced a bumblebee buried headfirst in the yellow circle of a dandelion next to my foot.

That hike turned out to be 8+ miles. I swallowed four ibuprofen when we returned to the car and whispered to an Amy that I was feeling shaky and unwell. At the café afterward, an Amy said, "I'm proud of you. I wasn't sure you'd want to do that." I shot back, "I might not have if I'd known it was 8 miles." But underneath, I was proud of me too.

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I recently picked up a book called Two in the Wild, essays about women and different kinds of friendship. Some essays could have described me and the Amys, like the one about the bike trip one writer takes with her two very-fit friends. But other essays differed. I feel beyond fortunate to have retained so many long-ago friends, including some I made in my earliest school years, all the way through graduate school and into full adulthood.² New friends, too. Friends for cabining and friends for coffeeing. Friends for giving advice and friends for listening. One close companion who hikes and talks with me, as well as friends who come through with support in a pinch. My sister is one of my best friends, and it’s been a joy to spend our adult years apart-but-together.

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Our hike was unquestionably worth the work. The columbine, lupine and flax, unnamed orange trumpetflowers and faux arrowleaf, the endless views of those snowy peaks. A perfect bumblebee, and even my aching legs, will persist as part of who I am because of the friendship I have with the Amys, something that has endured for over three decades. And which, like the hike, has been worth the effort to hold together.

Me and the Amys on a stunning 9000’ trail near Crested Butte, July 2023. I barely survived.

On our last night together, we eat at an improbable prix fixe fried chicken joint in CB. We are seated outside between two propane heaters, one of which is turned off. The Amys aren't dressed warmly enough but I have my trusty three-quarter-zip fleece and feel overly pleased about how prepared I am, for once. At the end of our meal as we nibble ice cream cookies, we look to an eastern ridge and find the great, silver spotlight of the full moon’s face smiling at us.

We stand together and marvel at her.

Silhouette

After Robert Minervini’s “Improvised Garden II (Water Street)”

more and more of my friends
are becoming parents or partners
to plants

i have lived long and short enough
to remember the homegirls who
danced non-stop until three a.m.
the moon a parabola to our party
i’ve grown up enough
to see them sing their favorite slow songs
to herbs and succulents on their windowsills
in homes they sowed from dreams 

the same sister who once dug a heel into
a man’s oblique now steals thyme with me
off of suburban bushes after brunch
in my neighborhood 

when a friend locked herself out—
the same person who loses wallets &
laptop chargers & saves my broken earrings
with a hot-glue gun in her backpack—
this pinay macguyver
has me breaking into her house at night
where we be tiptoeing over her
forest of planted avocado jars
into her dark room to find warmth 

the one whose living room and bedroom
once resembled a flea market  
or a super fly thrift store
and sometimes ikea—
the one who let me stay
she pays full price for potters &
vases—pronounced with the short
& therefore expensive ‘a’ sound 

one womxn named her garden
“grown and sexy”
bringing new meaning
to the phrase garden hoe. 

another who tops burritos with
white sauce dots like queen anne’s lace
also commits the crime of eating
one half at a time, you know, meal planning
with a sweet tooth, she drinks all of her horchata
& knows how
my family loves orchids &
she brings me them for my birthday
or any other tuesday
just because. 

my mentee once congratulated me with
mint & basil & lavender & rosemary—
sweet aromas gifted when i
was leaving a job that left me to rot
for another that was not  an office
with no windows, no green 

the women in my life reroot
over oceans & provinces & planes to cultivate
a geography of trunks & limbs
reminding me that to decompose
is the chance to live again 

my mother’s rose bushes open wide this spring
in her backyard without her
my mother’s body is buried in a plot
of other bodies without mine
isn’t a cemetery a garden
of all we’ve loved? 

and isn’t a garden full
of already dead things?
those who bury their beloved
put the gentlest parts
of themselves into soil
my mother is a seed
    the first woman i cannot unplant
       cannot pull or twist back into my hands
her orchids bloom reaching
how delicately the petals hang off
their stakes like gold, glass bangles on wrists
against disco lights   against the ambiance of a food truck menu
like lip gloss    how bougainvillea spill onto sidewalks
like how the sun stays lit
during an eclipse 

the flowers in my garden grow lively
& loving & hungry from pods & cinderblocks
my friends are florists
they water & cry & bloom & sleep
from loss & clay & unfolded laundry
sometimes we grow tired & tough
sometimes you have to open a cactus   to cut
pieces off so we don’t grow stuck 

arranging the flowers
in my garden
is a lattice
a life lesson
on how
to grow
up.

- Janice Lobo Sapigao

1. FYI Kebler Pass, one route into CB, tops out at 10,000 feet on the dot, according to my reference altimeter.

2. In the attached poem, the speaker unfurls long vines connecting friends and plants. It makes me think how much cultivating a lifetime of friends is so much like a garden, where you plant and water and hope the seeds take, and sometimes they do but other times they don’t. Or a longtime daylily patch you nursed to health reaches the end of its life cycle and peters out. But then the fringe of iris flutters to life, surprises you, tells you how much you needed those nodding badges of purple and white.