"Keep your arm and hand on the same plane," Christine was saying, "and use your whole upper body."

She selected a smooth flat stone and effortlessly made it skip four times upon the water.

"It's shoulder first, and then follow through," added Donna, demonstrating.

I knew I would never achieve this, but it was a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. We were sitting on the banks of the Russian River outside of Healdsburg. In the distance, a couple of young boys were taking turns swinging from a rope, jumping into the water, and squealing delightedly, quite oblivious to the "No Swimming" signs. It might have been a scene from Tom Sawyer except that they were speaking Spanish.

Meanwhile, the river shimmered and the sun beat down, and we were slow and lazy, laughing at how we had found our way to this new plateau of indolence. Donna picked up a perfect stone, small and flat like a little plate, polished by the water, and sacrificed it to another of my clumsy attempts. I envied my friends for their zen-like grace and tomboy skills, knew suddenly that successful stone-skipping, one of life's highest realizations, can only be attained through constant practice and that peculiar kind of focus which allows the steps to simply flow, led by some captain of the unconscious who has too long been absent from my head.

But this was not the time to evaluate myself or become snagged on a goal; this was my self-proclaimed hiatus. Hiatus from the Latin hiare, to yawn -- literally, a break in breathing, a break in an object, a lapse in continuity, a gap. I was sharing a gap with my girlfriends. I recalled riding the subway in London, where a crisp female voice advised passengers to "mind the gap" as they step off the train. The British have so many charming phrases, but in this one, I sensed a deeper meaning. And here I was, on a summer day, facing a gap of which I would be mindful.

Having a gap is a gift in itself, but if you are going to share it, choose your companions well. They must be people who can appreciate idleness, who can recognize that skipping stones is an adequate pastime, and that it's perfectly okay to leave the house a mess, window shop in a bakery, pause in a fairy circle among the redwoods, abbreviate a bike ride to snooze beneath a tree, and spin inconclusive spirals of lazy talk whose only purpose is to sparkle for a moment like dewy spider webs in the sun. I learned these things from Donna and Christine.

Donna also taught me that a battered old tin box is both useful and beautiful, especially when it is pale sea green and contains cookies. She brings that tin box along on all impromptu picnics -- and in her life, there are many, because although she is the queen of nowhere, she often proclaims a holiday. She has also packed firm black cherries, salted soy nuts, dense wheat bread, and an olive spread. And while we eat, we talk about food. Christine is planning to make strawberry shortcake for us that evening. "Bisquick," she asserts, "has no higher purpose."

As always, someone eventually mentions chocolate. "I've graduated from chocolate," Chris confides, "…moved on to deep fried. Much happier there."

She stretches out like a long, contented cat, and it is inevitably me who wonders aloud what's next on the agenda.

"Agenda?" asks Donna, as though uttering a word from a foreign vocabulary. "I thought this was a day to relax."

Here I was, not minding the gap, but trying as always to fill it. Fortunately, a breeze at that moment brought a fusion of fragrance which spontaneously transported me back to the summer I was nine in Prospect Park. It was the smell of heat and sumptuous earth, the sweet dankness of a trail along a creek filled with tadpoles. The creek led to a luminous lake where ladies in straw hats rented rowboats, and above the lake was a white boathouse with stone steps. I sat on those steps with my brother once, sipping a vanilla egg cream, and everything else was -- as it should be -- irrelevant.

It's nice to be enveloped in summer with a river sliding by. It's good to know that sweet peas still grow along a road you once bicycled, that the best bread pudding in the entire world is from the Creamery Bakery, that tea cups needn't match, cookies should be under-baked, and you cannot own too many hats. It's liberating to realize that life's rules do not require that you carry a book and a writing implement at all times, and that poems turn up where you least expect them, like an earring in the bedclothes or a feather on the wind .

Cynthia Carbone Ward