Garden Variety is taking a day off today.

Nancy, my best friend since the seventh grade, is in town with her husband, and I think we will do some touristy stuff.

Nancy and Connie and I have been best friends since junior high, which is what we used to call middle school.

After the three of us finished the heavy lifting of raising young children, we began to plan weekend getaways for just the three of us every year or so. One of us would do the planning and the other two would simply make plane reservations.

One of our trips was to New Orleans, where we stayed in a funky B&B and toured the Garden District of the city. This was, of course, before Katrina.

For another weekend, we went to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland - in the cool and quiet late fall - and walked in the woods and talked for hours.

We have visited New York City. St. Michaels, MD, upstate New York and Bucks County Pa. All three of us did not make it every time. But whenever two of us are together, the other is there as well.

One of our most memorable trips was arranged by Nancy to Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State, where she and her family now live.

We stayed in a cottage that was more like a doll's house and visited the shops and restaurants on the tiny island.

I am telling this story because my vivid memory of that trip is of the flowers.

The cool, moist weather on that tiny island produced the most beautiful and abundant window boxes, containers and tiny front-yard gardens.

The colors, perhaps enhanced by the droplets of water in the air, were almost unreal.

Nancy will only visit for a little more than a day. She and her husband drove across country to bring furniture to their daughter in Baltimore. They have other friends and other stops, and then they must head back to the left coast.

The pressure is on me to make Nancy's brief time here memorable.

There are plenty of museums and monuments and art galleries in Annapolis, Baltimore and Washington.

But I will try to find some flowers for her, too.