I got a sweet email yesterday from my bestie, Bonnie as I do every time I send out my “New Blog Post” announcement. “What a fun read this blog was,” she said. “SO many talents and gifts you are blessed with and are passing onto Chloe. And she is your own personal seamstress now!”
I wrote her back, saying, “Aw, thanks so much, Bonnie! You and I inherited quite different things from our mothers, didn’t we? You inherited great talents too, just not for decorating!
Early in our friendship, around the same time I was pulling my hair out trying to sew tab-top curtains for every window in my house, Bonnie confessed that she had no eye for design. She marvelled at my ability to sew, to paint a room a pretty color, to pick out furniture that looked nice together, to make a home look…homey. “Honestly, Leslie, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to go about making my home lovely,” she said. “I guess my Mom just didn’t model it for me. She didn’t care what the house looked like.”
By the end of our first year of friendship, we knew practically everything there was to know about one another because we talked for hours, day after day. We’d covered every subject imaginable, including, of course, our childhoods, our parents, how we grew up. She knew my mother was your typical fifties housewife who spent her days cooking, sewing and making a beautiful and comfortable environment out of scraps. Mom baked brownies and refinished furniture and made art for our bedroom walls. Bonnie’s mom, on the other hand, was a fifties female renegade who dedicated her time to health and nutrition. She was planting an organic garden before anyone had heard of organic gardening, she taught nutrition classes in the basement and started her own health food business, developed a 7-day detox program, attended lectures all over the country, became an early and avid member of the National Food Association. She was a badass.
Bonnie’s mom painted everything in the house green, threw in a bunch of mismatched stuff and high-tailed it down to the basement to lecture on growing sprouts. And Bonnie inherited those talents big time. While I was sewing tab-top curtains, she was organizing wellness conferences and interviewing health experts on the radio. When we met in a support group 1996, we became fast friends, both of us seeking help to recover from the effects of alcoholic loved ones on our lives. We discovered we had a common goal — finding peace and happiness.
I taught a few fitness classes a week and Bonnie was taking time off from work to be home with her two adorable daughters. Since Chloe and her daughters, Beth and Lauren were in school all day, we had loads of time to hang out. We went to meetings, practiced our program together, went for coffee afterward, traded quiche recipes, and took walks on the beach. We read every self-help book we could get our hands on — Melody Beattie, Maryanne Williamson, M. Scott Peck, Anne Lamotte. We went on a sugar detox, made pacts about meditating and scheduling daily visits with God, I worked the Grief Recovery program with her and we grew in our faith and our serenity, slowly, together.
I can’t remember which one of us found the book called Simple Abundance, but it became our favorite daily reader, our bible for several years. Both Bonnie and I desperately needed the wisdom of Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book which promised to show women how to make their daily lives an expression of their authentic selves. The back cover reads, “Your own true path leads you to a happier, more fulfilling and contented way of life — the state of grace known as Simple Abundance.”
And the promises were, for us, legit. Bonnie and I helped one another to incorporate the six principles that acted as our guides — gratitude, simplicity, order, harmony, beauty and joy. Every day, we exchanged notes on the reading of the day, from Creating a Gratitude Journal to Parting with Fashion Mistakes to Cooking for Comfort to Travelling on Business to Coping with Stress to Making Boundaries to Answered Prayers. It all sounds kind of trite now, but back then, we really needed help shaping our habits and our attitudes and our surroundings.
“Did you read this morning’s essay?” Bonnie asked me on the phone one morning. The month of June focussed on details of order and beauty. “June 5th, Your Bedroom:Cradle of Civilization. It says: ‘How does your bedroom look? Do you experience a sense of delight when you walk in? Here’s where joy enters the scheme of things through visual charm. Your walls should be painted a soothing color — white, blue, a dusty rose, sage green. Make sure you select a color you won’t grow tired of… If you hang pictures, make sure you love what you’re looking at. It will be the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing at night.’”
“Yes, I did read that. So great.”
“She says we should make the bed the most comfortable place in the house,” Bonnie said. “And that a woman should love her bed covers with a mad passion.”
“Yes! And then you add in personal flourishes like lamps, a flowering plant, treasured photos, books. She says to create a sacred space for self-nurturance.”
“I want to love my bed covers with a mad passion,” Bonnie sighed. “And I would love to have a sacred space for self-nurturance. But I don’t have the foggiest idea where to start.”
I took matters into my own hands and told her I was going to help her create the beautiful retreat she longed for. Her condo was great, but you could tell she didn’t put much energy into design. Like her mom before her, she had a mad passion for nutrition and exercise and health, not rugs and fabrics and decor. The place was a nice, spacious two-story place not far from the beach in Wilmington that she shared with her then husband and daughters. I thought it had potential.
We chose an item Bonnie loved for our bedroom retreat inspiration — a lovely framed watercolor of pink flowers that would hang right over the headboard of the bed. I picked out a soft sage green paint color for the walls and thought we could swag some gauzy fabric over a curtain rod to cover the vertical blinds (remember, it was the nineties, very fashionable then!) The next order of business was a trip to the fabric store, a huge warehouse stuffed to the gills with rolls and bolts and tables stacked high with material. I intended on starting Bonnie’s education there.
“Okay, let’s just walk around a little bit and you just look and tell me what appeals to you,” I said.
“I don’t know!” she said. “This is overwhelming.” I told her to just keep her colors in mind, that maybe we could layer some light-weight dusty rose fabric with some filmy green. Or we could find a print with those colors. Wandering through the mountains of material in the harsh fluorescent lighting of that cavernous warehouse, she looked like she was under attack. She looked like someone was forcing her to eat a sausage biscuit. She looked like she might bolt out any moment and dive into a research article on the benefits of progesterone cream.
This is where I should tell you that Bonnie is the most thoughtful and intelligent woman you’d ever hope to meet. She reads constantly about the things that interest her, health, history, spirituality and can quote facts and figures like nobody’s business, she is lazer-focussed when someone is speaking to her, but possibly because of these habits, she just doesn’t often notice what’s going on outside of her curious brain. So she can come across as a little… blonde. Her tall, thin figure and head of springy blonde hair don’t help matters.
So sometimes she’s just fun to mess with. I walked her around the store, picking up fabrics I thought she might like, telling her to feel the texture, the weight, to imagine the way it might hang. We pulled rolls of fabric off the hangers and compared prices, draped different material over the table. Passing the apparel fabric section of the store, I stopped and picked up a black polyester fabric with threads of teal and gold and red and yellow running through, a fabric that would make a good disco skirt.
“Hmmm…” I said. “Feel this one. What do you think about this?”
“Well..” Bonnie said, looking confused. She squinted at it for a moment. “I guess it’s…”
“It’s hideous, Bonnie!” I yelled. “That was a test!”
The next job was getting her bedroom cleaned out and painting the walls. I brought my painting tools over and pulled her into the bedroom to tackle the job. We worked for a half an hour before I realized Bonnie sucked at painting. She was slobbing the paint onto the walls and dripping it onto the floor, creating more work every minute.
“Okay, Bonnie, you’re fired,” I finally told her. “Why don’t you go make us some lunch and I’ll do this myself.”
Finally, we got her bedroom put back together, both of us pleased with the sacred space we had created together. It taught me that she was more clueless about this stuff than I even imagined, so any time after, I talked to her like a interior design kindergartner.
“I’ll pick out your decor from now on,” I told her. “You need to stick to nutrition and supplements.”
For twenty five years, I’ve called her up regularly with any major or minor health question that pops up — What vitimins should I take for cramps in my calves? Am I supposed to not be eating spinach every day? Can you recommend some supplements for increased energy so I can get through dance rehearsals? My chiropractor says my stomach issues are related to pancreas insufficiency. What should I do? How in the hell do you make kale taste good? What do you think about brain biofeedback? Omar needs to be tested for allergies. Where should I go?
It never fails. She drops everything and addresses all my concerns thoroughly, setting me up with products or doctors or research articles (although I told her long ago that I don’t want to read boring research, I just want her to tell me what to do.) In 2015, I had a scary breast “pre-cancer” diagnosis. My first call after getting off the phone with the doctor was to Bonnie. She picked me up out of the swirl of panic and set me on the path of healing my disease without surgery or chemo. She guided me towards a nutritionist, a naturopathic doctor who prescribed an extensive herbal protocol, a chiropractor. She did all the research and then told me who to call. She has single-handedly given me all the tools I need to live a long, healthy life.
I visited Bonnie in the spring, staying in her guest room for three nights. I smiled at the correct placement of the painting over the bed, the pretty new lamps, everything pulled together with a coordinating white and teal color scheme. I snuggled down into the luxurious high count cotton sheets and billowy down comforter, the feathery pillows. The student had become the master. She squealed with joy and awe when I gave her a hostess gift I picked up at TJ Maxx — a yellow throw pillow for the bed and a yellow planter with daisies for the dresser. She thinks I’m a decorating genius. And I thank my lucky stars that she’s not.
The November 18th reading in Simple Abundance, “The Blessing of Friends” begins with a quote from Anais Nin — “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
