Letter of Recommendation: Victorian Visits

why don't you stay awhile

Good day, gays!

Welcome back to mid-March, the most confusing season of them all here in Northfield, Minnesota! Whether it’s blizzarding nine inches of snow in four hours or hot enough for the college kids to be jogging in short-shorts less than two days later, good luck getting dressed, and may the odds on whether or not you need a hat be ever in your favor.

March:/

Our friend Rae has been here, staying with us, for nearly a week; he’s upstairs right now using our mesh kitchen strainer to diffuse his curly hair with a blowdryer. This, he assures me, is “really common.”

I have straight hair, so I don’t know this life. I also can’t ever seem to remember that when a curly-haired friend comes to visit, it’s a serious thing for them to announce they’re going to take a shower and wash their hair.

Like this morning. When Rae made his shower announcement after breakfast, I said, “Oh, mm-hmm,” and went back to painting my nails, not understanding that Davin and I had both just committed to not using the only available bathroom in the house for the next three hours. Too late – a finished cup of coffee later, to be exact – I remembered that a shampoo is just the beginning for curly-haired people. Just step one. Then there is the application of products; the dunking of the hair into various bowls; the wrapping; the waiting; the twisting; the diffusing; the air-drying; the finger-combing. A body of work for body and werk.

The payoff for all this toil is clear. Rae has just now come downstairs again, and his hair is a mass of shining ringlets, soft and springy. He will have these perfect curls – curls I envy, curls I would commit crimes to have – for the next five days. Maybe even a week. Anytime he clips his hair up, or wears it down, or ties it into a bun to exercise and tiny ringlets escape to frame his face like a Jane Austen heroine breathlessly running across the moors, his hair will look perfect and done, effortless and wild and enviable.

Can’t imagine. My fine, limp hair gets so greasy after a single day of not-washing that I once came home from work to have Davin look up at me and say, “Oh, is it raining?”

Friends, the sun was shining. I am simply a disgusting oily sewer rat, and my hair was so slicked with grease it looked soaking wet.

Anyway! Rae is one of Davin’s best friends, but I met Rae in Chicago, before Davin moved there, so Rae and I have our own friendship, too. He lives in Scotland now, so he can’t come to visit very often.

But when Rae does come to stay, it’s for a Victorian Visit.

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Letter of Recommendation: The Victorian Visit

What’s a Victorian Visit?

I’m so glad you asked! I made the name up! A Victorian Visit is what I call it when someone comes to stay with you for a really long time. We’re talking weeks, not days. Possibly even months! Everything is on the table when it’s a Victorian Visit!

The name comes from reading a lot of old books. In old books, it’s pretty normal for characters to go to stay with friends for weeks on end. Sometimes for whole seasons; sometimes longer than that. If they were rich, they’d take a servant or two with them. If they weren’t rich, they’d simply go, and be sheltered and fed and included in daily household life for what felt, to my modern eyes, like an impossibly long time. The luxury! Didn’t these people have jobs? Or places they needed to be?

And then remote work became commonplace. And then, one day, Davin and I were on the phone with a mutual, much-loved friend, arranging the dates for them to come visit. As we chatted, it suddenly dawned on me that there was no reason – no reason at all – that this close friend who worked remotely and was going to come stay with us for a couple days – couldn’t stay longer.

Much longer.

What if they came for a week? I suggested. My eyes met Davin’s over the kitchen counter, his phone on speaker between us both. Why not… why not two weeks?

The offer was accepted, and the Victorian Visit was born. And we loved it.

Here was a good friend, not dropping in for a whirlwind exhausting weekend of big meals and big plans, but instead here to go to the dog park on an uneventful afternoon and talk a lot of shit about that one badly behaved husky on the way home. Here to watch Netflix and fall asleep on the couch. And then here to wake up the next day and wander into the kitchen in their glasses and threadbare jammies, asking hopefully if there was any coffee left.

For days and days on end. There was no need to rush; there was no reason to cram our schedule full of ~exciting activities~ planned specifically for our guest. We could just be normal – we all could work, and glare at our laptops, and make regular dinners, and argue about whether or not someone was being a control freak by insisting we always do the jigsaw puzzle edges first. It was incredible.

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Now, I know a Victorian Visit seems fairly obvious as a concept, but seriously: We do this all the time. It’s great. [Please note, though: Do not try a Victorian Visit with a friend you have never spent extreme amounts of time with before, should you wish to remain friends.]

Rae will be here for a month, all told. That’s long enough for me to relearn the intimate details of his curly-hair routine. Long enough for him to try every moisturizer I own in search of the one that will make his forehead not feel dry and tight by 3 PM. It’s long enough for Davin to feel comfortable asking Rae to spend an entire afternoon helping him put together a new utility trailer in the driveway, even though that is so boring. Honestly, a month is a long enough visit that we’ll all get a little sick of each other, at some point.

But I feel like that is the point. That’s what the Victorian Visit is for: to hang out. Thoroughly. To just be with each other. The way we all did when we first met and became friends, before any of us had anywhere we really needed to be.

A Victorian Visit helps us remember the small things about one another – say, hypothetically, that you had forgotten that your beloved friend really likes cottage cheese and will spoon cottage cheese curds up from a bowl in full view of your repulsed face, if you don’t stop him. For instance. But also that same friend will spend hours making you homemade focaccia, pressing each kalamata olive softly into the oiled and dimpled surface of the dough like a benediction. You forget these things, about each other.

It’s so nice, so comfortable to be reminded.

A Victorian Visit is about spending time together. Taking the time to catch up and be real people to one another again. Taking time to relearn, again and again, what it is that we love about each other.