This is Getting Old by Susan Moon Page A

that there was no one left in her generation. I guess the silver lining of having your friends all die before you is that it helps you feel more ready to die. I’m thinking of the old spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”: “If you get there before I do, tell all my friends I’m coming, too.”
    Now, over forty years after we first met, Susie and I have come to this bait shack at the edge of the harbor, to take pictures and write. We are practicing the exchange of self and other. Susie comes from California and lives in Massachusetts, and I come from Massachusetts and live in California. She, the photographer, has lately become a writer, and I am learning to take pictures. Perhaps our next collaborative project will be a book with text by her and photos by me.
    This week I read a piece of the young adult novel she’s working on and gave her feedback, and yesterday she taught me how to get greater depth of field, so that both the green seaweed floating on the surface and the barnacled rocks under the water were in focus. I love that phrase,
depth of field
. It describes our friendship.
    Out the window the low sun paints the rocks with yellow light and moving shadows, so that figure and ground keep changing, and the rocks flow into each other, soft as water. Now Susie stands with one foot on either side of a crevice, in her familiar bow-legged stance. She points the camera down, adjusts the focus, pauses, completely still. She’s waiting for something,maybe a wave to lap up. I hope she gets just the shot she wants. I feel indescribably fond of her, in her black wool cap.
    We have the same name. In college we were both called Susie. Once, she woke me up in our dorm room, calling, “Susie!”
    â€œYes?” I said.
    â€œOh my god!” she said. “That was so weird! When I called you Susie just then I meant
me
.”

House of Commons

    O VER TIME , without my planning it, my house has become part of the commons.
    I’ve lived in the same house for close to forty years, almost unheard of in this age of family uprootings. I’ve always shared the house with other people, and I still do.
    The first epoch in the house was the time of my children’s growing up. In 1972, I was a newly divorced mother of two small children, and I bought the house in Berkeley, California, with the help of my parents. I was afraid I’d feel isolated if I lived alone with the kids, especially since their father moved away soon after we parted. I thought it would be good for them, too, to have other caring adults in the household. I chose a homey, shingled house, whose four-plus bedrooms made it plenty big enough to share with others. Two venerable walnut trees arched over the house in the back yard.
    Friends moved in with me—and we four adults and three kids lived together for the first few years. The walnut trees bore many walnuts that we dried in the attic and put into pies. The other mother and I took turns making supper for the kids. A housemate painted a sun on the kitchen ceiling, with wiggly yellow rays reaching out.
    We had massage classes on the living room floor in front of the fire, and wild parties with homemade music. I see now that it might not have been the most stable household possible for my children, but in Berkeley in the seventies, it seemed almost normal. We were transcending the claustrophobic limits of the nuclear family.
    The time went by, the people came and went. Those who moved in were always friends or friends of friends. An artist slept in the kitchen hallway in order to use her bedroom for a studio. One man spent hours in his room practicing reflexology on his own feet while wearing a turban and pantaloons. As the tides ebbed and flowed, bringing Zen practitioners, boyfriends, exchange students, dogs and cats, the kids and I remained onshore.
    People who didn’t live in the house came to know it, too. The massage classes gave way to more sober events,