The Gift for the Friend Who Nursed Me Back

I was sick for six weeks in the winter of my thirty-fifth year.

Not critically. But badly enough that I could not work and could not cook and could not really do much except sleep and feel terrible about sleeping. I lived alone. I had not thought much about what that would mean in a situation like this.

My friend Ngozi thought about it.

She called on day three and said: I am coming over.

I said: you do not have to.

She said: I know I do not have to. I will be there at noon.

She came over at noon. She brought groceries. Not the wrong groceries, not the thoughtful-but-unhelpful kind, the exact right things, the things I actually wanted when I was sick, which she knew because she knew me. She made soup and left it in the refrigerator in portions. She did a load of laundry without asking. She sat with me for two hours and we watched a show and she left at four.

She came back three more times over the following two weeks.

She never made it a thing. She never used the word favor. She just showed up and was useful and then went home and then came back.

When I recovered I thought a lot about what to give her.

The problem with thanking someone for taking care of you is that the thing they gave you is not really a thing. It is time and attention and the specific labor of caring for another person. Those are not easily returned.

But I tried.

Ngozi grew things. On her windowsills, in pots, she had a kitchen full of herbs and a small collection of succulents and one large fiddle-leaf fig that she had kept alive for five years and considered a personal triumph.

I had a ceramic pot commissioned. A good one, handmade, in the particular warm terracotta that worked in her kitchen, with a small inscription along the base in small letters: you showed up. I keep growing because of it.

I filled it with a plant she had mentioned wanting, a specific trailing pothos variety she did not have yet.

She called me after it arrived.

She said: I read the inscription three times.

I said: good. That is what it is for.

She said: you are going to make me cry and I have things to do today.

I said: the plant will still be there after the crying.

She laughed and I heard her wipe her eyes and she said: it is a very good pot.

I said: you deserved a very good pot.

She did. She does.