They tore up her garden today. I don't know if she witnessed its destruction, if she saw the earthmovers and bulldozers tearing up the ground.

I hear she's around. She's been sighted at the Unicorn café making a phone call, and at Accents Plus buying silver jewelry, and sleeping on the porch of her old house. My father, who lives nearby, took pity on her one night and gave her a blanket, even though we're not supposed to help her. Makes us co-dependent we're told.

Last summer, right after they took away her dad and locked up the house, I sat with her on the porch one night. We leaned against the railing and watched the lightning bugs and talked about our childhood.

Ours was a summer friendship. We were in different classes but we spent every summer together. We were summer girls, born 5 days apart in July of 1951.

We grew apart after high school. I only saw her at Christmas. I'd go over to visit, usually on Christmas Eve, and we'd sit around the table in her mother's red kitchen and fill each other in on our lives. It was only when I moved back to Evanston in 1987 that we saw each other more than once a year.

She was still living at home, with her parents. It strikes me as odd now, but it didn't then. She had a beautiful garden. She was my mentor, my gardening guru. She knew what to plant in sun and shade, she could identify every flower I showed her, she gave me cuttings and seedpods to scatter. She introduced me to Anton's Greenhouse.

Her backyard - actually her parents backyard - was a glory. She had full sun, which helped, but even her shady spots were grand, brimming with foxglove and columbine. Her garden was a riot of color: orange poppies, yellow buttercups, magenta bellflowers, purple delphiniums. Her flowers overflowed the beds and spilled onto the grass.

Hers was an artist's garden. She did watercolors of blossoms, she made collages of leaves and spores, she took photographs of her flowers and pasted them onto greeting cards.

It was a fabulous cutting garden too. After every visit, when I followed her around like a baby duck, trying to absorb everything she said, I was sent home with a gorgeous bouquet. Sometimes she rode over to my house on her bicycle to check on my progress, her wicker basket overflowing with flowers. Sometimes I would come home on a summer afternoon and find a bunch in a mason jar, sitting on my back deck.

Then, a few years ago, after I had established a garden of my own, containing more than a few transplants from hers, something changed. I don't know what happened. Her mother died. Her dad's health declined. She was approaching the change of life without having married or had kids. She was tired of her job. She had a love affair that didn't work out. Maybe it was some of those things, maybe all of them. Maybe it was some hidden heartbreak no one knew about but her. Maybe that melancholy that I saw as a child but didn't know how to name, was there all along, eating away at her like the cancer that killed her mother.

Whatever it was, she began to neglect her garden. Her plants went to seed, then to weed. She stopped going to work. They came to get her dad and put him in a home. They sold the house, leaving her no place to go. So she slept on the porch. Then the new owners came and she can't do that anymore. To tell you the truth, I don't think she'd want to anyway, now that her flowers are gone.

And my friend? Where has she gone?

She's gone to the streets I guess. Become one of Evanston's homeless. She was spotted on the steps of one of the churches in Evanston that takes them in at night.

She haunts her old block during the day. My parents have seen her on the street a few times. My mother says she looks like a wraith. I look for her on my runs but haven't seen her. I'm glad. I don't want to see her looking like a ghost. I don't want to think about what has happened to her.

I want to think instead of her flowers.

I know where her flowers have gone. Yes, some have gone to graveyards. But not every one. Some have gone to my garden. Maybe to other friends' gardens, too. She was always generous with her flowers.

Some will return. I know they will poke up someday, unexpectedly. I'll be walking along the alley and suddenly there will be a bright orange poppy, cheerful and exuberant, and having no idea it's out of place.

She didn't marry or have kids, like she wanted to. She didn't inherit the house and live to a cheerful old age surrounded by her garden, like I wanted her to.

But maybe one day, like one of her perennials, she'll be back, and in bloom.