Summer in the Palm of Time

Margaret sat on her front porch, her cat Mouse curled on her lap and Barnaby, her golden retriever, resting his chin on her knee. In her weathered hands she held an old baseball glove—leather cracked, the pocket still shaped from thousands of catches.

Seventy years ago, under the swaying palm tree in her family's California backyard, her best friend Ruthie had taught her to catch. Ruthie, with dirt on her knees and determination in her eyes, had tossed that same ball again and again until Margaret stopped closing her eyes every time it came near.

"You've got to trust your hands," Ruthie had said, pressing her own palm against Margaret's. "Feel it coming before it arrives. That's how life works too, Marge."

Ruthie had been right. About baseball, about life, about everything that mattered. They'd played together every summer until Ruthie's family moved away the year they turned sixteen. They'd written letters for a while— Margaret still had the stack tied with ribbon in her dresser drawer—but gradually, as young lives do, they'd drifted apart.

Barnaby lifted his head and let out a soft woof, sensing her melancholy. Mouse stretched and resettled, purring against the familiar rhythm of Margaret's heart.

"It's alright, my dears," Margaret whispered, stroking the dog's soft ears. "Just remembering."

Now at seventy-eight, Margaret understood what Ruthie had been trying to teach her all those years ago. You had to open yourself to catch what life threw your way— even the hard pitches, even the ones that came when you weren't ready. Ruthie had died three years ago, but her wisdom lived on in Margaret's calloused hands and in the way she still watched baseball games on television, keeping score in a notebook just as Ruthie had taught her.

The afternoon sun warmed the porch. Margaret closed her eyes and imagined she could hear Ruthie's laugh, feel the ball smacking into the glove, smell the scent of that palm tree after a summer rain. Some friendships, she knew, never really ended. They just changed form, became part of you, like the lines on your own palm— the map of where you'd been and who you'd loved along the way.