Long time friends

I received an order today on my website, the email address looked vaguely familiar. although I had never seen it before. I was in the middle of making butternut squash soup and was between the fresh ginger and coconut milk. Multi-tasking as usual.
Since I was just in Cincinnati, and had just driven by the house where Lynn grew up it felt pretty normal to hear from her, except that we haven’t seen one another or kept in touch much in many years. She still lives in cincinnati but the few times that I get back there I’m swallowed up by my great big beautiful family and don’t ever seem to make the friend circuit although I find myself longing to make it happen somehow.

This is the person with whom I walked over a too-high train tressel, went ice skating with, discovered the Cowsills, The Jackson Five, James Taylor. Her Mom used to drive us around and honk at boys on the street – to which my Mom would have been appalled. We walked to school together everyday and back most days too. There was a train track behind Lynn’s house that went all they way to my house and we shared the “music” of the whistle in our living rooms. Lynn was with us on a camping trip when we heard the news that my sisters fiance was killed in Viet Nam. She hung with me all day skipping stones on the lake, the only thing I could seem to do. I remember feeling sorry for her that she was with us that day.

I was with Lynn in 1975 when I met my husband on the beach at Cape Hatteras. We were minding our own business when two guys came along, “hi girls, where you from”? When we said Cincinnati, the handsome shy one of the two said, “I am too”. Lynn and I looked at one another as if this were the worst line we’d ever heard…..except, it was true. I always love telling this part of the story when people ask where Steve and I met.

Lynn was the first to get married (not to the other guy on the beach) and I missed her as girls do when a great guy comes along and interrupts an exclusive girlfriend duo. Gone were the days of walking, talking, playing volleyball. I remember the ache that I felt not being able to see her as she and her husband moved to northern Ohio. Ahhh the things of girlhood, right?

We spend our lives gathering and surrendering friends, holding them close in our hearts. I am so grateful for the people who grace my life; in the past few years several very good friends have died, their blessings in my life are not forgotten either.