Memories Like a River
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One of my writer friends likens our lives to a river which
carries us along from beginning to ending. I’m not the whole river so my
memories are only a part of what is real. Each of us will remember a little
differently, so there end up being many truths flowing along in the currents of
our river, many stories, many versions and many revisions, all of them with
pieces of truth.
The day before Christmas I received an email headed “Indiana
Laconia Elizabeth Harrison County”. The message was from a woman whom I did not
know but her name was familiar. I grew my earliest years in Indiana.
When I was days from twelve years, my Dad uprooted us to
share his long-time dream to farm in Montana. Those first two years of Dad’s
dream were my nightmare. I was so homesick.
When I was fourteen, my Dad sent us back to Indiana by
train, to spend the summer with cousins and with my best friends.
Intrigued, I opened the message from Indiana to find a photo
of a hand-written manuscript covered in brown grocery bag paper entitled, “The
Best Friends Visit Montana”, with a list of characters, Sondra Jean, Phyllis,
Janet and Jo Ann. Written by Jo Ann.
The woman who sent the email, Kathy, went on to say she
found this manuscript in a box of stuff from Jo Ann’s Mom’s estate sale. Following
this initial email, Kathy and I had a series of lively conversations, well
peppered with questions from both of us. For me, what also followed was a whole
flowing river of memories.
I lived further down the hill from a family with Kathy’s
last name who lived in a small but lovely stone house. I had a crush on Richard
(an older man by two years) when I was nine and ten. Was he her brother?
Back in those days, in that culture, my crush was of the
type that I didn’t dare make eye contact with Richard. When I visited Indiana
two years later, I saw the gangly, pimpled Richard standing on a street corner
with his friends in front of the grocery in Elizabeth. Ewww. I still remember
losing any vestiges of my long-ago crush. Later Kathy told me that Richard went
on to be Homecoming King. Sigh.
Kathy was not Richard’s sister. His sister was Cathy. But
they were cousins. She asked if I would like the manuscript. Of course, I want
it, but I am willing to simply have copies via an email document.
My friend Jo Ann had passed on years ago from cancer. She
had lived in Seattle for a while, perhaps I was across the water on the
Peninsula at the same time, a thought that fills me with regrets that I might
have been able, somehow, before the days of social media, to be with my old
friend. Phyllis lives in Tennessee. She had located me a year ago and we keep
in touch. I learned that Janet lives in South Carolina. Now I’ll get to talk
with Janet.
We girls spent a lot of time with each other that summer of
my vacation in Indiana, overnights in their bedrooms or in tents on a lawn. I
remember one night, all of us sitting together, each with a different book,
reading until a Mom hollered for “lights out”. That memory is smudgy so it
might have been with a cousin, but does that detail matter in the greater
River?
It was hard to go back home to Montana at the end of that
summer. Notice I say I went back home? I
returned knowing I had forever friends. I returned with a different
perspective. No longer homesick, no longer crying myself to sleep at night, I
had my Montana home, an Indiana home, friends in both places.
I never lost that perspective, even when I lost contact with
my friends in both States when we all left school and went divergent ways in
our lives. I find it fascinating that in these, my sunset years, my old friends
are so close to me in memory, bringing me joy.
I am grateful that Kathy reached out to find me, possibly
forging another friendship in the process. Already I feel like she is a cousin
of sorts, wading along in the same river. Know what I mean?
Sondra Ashton
HWC or whatever it’s called
First week in January
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