Notes on a lifelong friendship: Dust for 140 years, and it's as if she has just left the room

I'VE been hanging out with Charlotte for years. You could sayshe's one of my best friends.

We generally meet at night, when I curl up on the couch. In amoment, the denim fabric, the sensible tan wallpaper, the scatteredtoys - all are gone.

I'm gone, too, from southern Wisconsin to the desolate, windsweptYorkshire moors.

There's the smoke from the mills (you don't expect it; but thiswas industrial England); there is the churchyard with its smoothcrypts like refrigerators lying on their sides, the narrow fir trees,the isolated parsonage, where Charlotte lived with her two sistersand one brother and their father, the eccentric Rev. Patrick Bronte.

I know …