I picked her up at the Phoenix airport around 9 p.m., this tall young woman wearing Converse high-tops painted two different colors, and pants with one leg black and one leg white. Her curly blonde hair was blue now, but I recognized her smile, and the hug felt the same, maybe even better than the one I got a few years ago when I last saw her in Minnesota. We stopped for chicken strips and iced tea before jumping back on the I-17 and talking all the way to Prescott.
Time has a funny way of moving fast and slow. At first, I wondered how we’d fill this three-week visit between her school year ending and summer beginning. We poked around Cottonwood, Sedona, and Jerome. We left her phone in a bathroom and had to make another trip to Cottonwood the next day. We woke up early on Saturdays to visit the Farmer’s Market, even though she’s not a morning person. We taught her how to drive. She taught us how to bake lavender cookies and decorate cakes. At first, it felt like we had plenty of days to work through the to-do list she made when she first got here, but soon we were rushing to get the last items done before she flew back home. We didn’t get around to the garden box. We never washed the dogs. We skipped the gym.
Of all the things my niece did with us during her visit, my favorite memory of her will be sitting on the back porch under the full moon, wrapped up in blankets on our porch swing, playing a game called “We’re Not Really Strangers.” It’s a card game about conversations and getting to know each other, simple yet hard to play because you have to think about what you really know of the other person. We tried it the second night she was here, starting at the first level, asking icebreaker questions about whether we thought the other person was someone who would go camping and if so, what kind of camping would they do?
It was difficult, I realized because I had spent most of my time with her when she was a little girl who liked to play Polly Pockets and climb backwards up the playground side. Now she was a young woman who had spent a month in Cambodia and two years living on her own as a college student. I had no idea if she liked to go camping or what type of books she liked to read. I think she was just as stumped about me.
We put the game on the living room table and didn’t get around to playing it again until it was almost time for her to go. On the last night, we sat under the stars and pulled cards from the harder section, talking about topics I usually don’t get into, even with close friends. But after three weeks together, it was easier to answer some of the big questions those cards asked: who we are right now, who we want to be, what we wish we could change about our lives and what we think the other person should know about themselves.
I was struck by how many things we agreed on, despite the 34 years between us, and by what I had learned about her life, and what she had noticed about me and Mike, in our time together. I thought back to the day, almost twenty years ago, when I watched her make her way into this world. Now I am watching her do it again. I hope she keeps asking those questions, not only of me but of herself and everyone around her. Because we’re not really strangers—we just need to make time to sit down and talk to each other.