LONG-TERM FRIENDSHIP

        

I’m happy I found out how to schedule my blog posts because I’m leaving town for a couple of days.. What you’ll read in the next few days are posts I wrote last November/December. There are only a couple left and then it’s on to new subjects that are more relevant to what’s happening today.

I’m going to drive south to Elma Washington. My good friend Dianne lives there and she is a widow as well. We’ve been friends for almost 50 years. I think AJ was about two when she moved to Seattle to live with my sister and work in the federal building downtown. Besides my sister and their two gay roommates, she didn’t know a soul in Seattle except for me and that was only because of my sister.

          We became fast friends before she decided to return home to Montesano. But, John and I (and AJ) really liked Dianne and over time we got to know her much better and then the man who came into her life, Wild Bill. Actually, he wasn’t really wild, we just liked to call him that.

          Bill owned a dairy farm with his dad and brother on the Wynoochee River. John and I began to go to the farm every Memorial Day, July 4^th and Labor Day weekends. There was always a big potluck (Dianne’s family is huge and they sort of adopted the Karlbergs); and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. John and AJ even went down a time or two to help Bill and his family with farm work. I had a job and couldn’t go. Somewhere in there Dianne and Bill had a daughter, Misty.

Eventually the dairy farm was sold and Dianne and Bill bought some land outside Elma. They built what was to be Bill’s shop (in about 20 years); and I remember one weekend, John wired the whole place for electricity so Dianne could use her washer and dryer and have hot water. This amazing woman did all her cooking on a wood stove, including canning the vegetables she grew, fish they caught, etc. You never went hungry when visiting them; plus, we never ever left without milk or vegetables or something they’d produced on their farm.

          In 1979, John and I had been trying for five years to have another child. Dianne had just had her second daughter, Brie, the previous January.

“You’ll get pregnant when you come down here.” Dianne predicted. “Everyone around here is pregnant. It must be something in the water.”  

So, down we went for Memorial Day weekend as we always did. We slept in our 1970 VW Camper; and it must have been the water because when we went back on July 4^th, I was pregnant with Thor. Dianne seemed a little distracted and I remember telling John she didn’t seem too excited about my pregnancy. Well, Labor Day weekend, I learned the reason for Dianne's distraction...she had gotten pregnant that weekend too and Brie wasn’t even six months old then. Pretty big shock.

Dianne gave birth to a boy, Reese, five days before I gave birth to Thor. For years, John and I and the boys went down to the farm. When they could (which wasn’t often because of horses, cows, crops, etc.) they’d come visit us. Thor would spend a week with Reese in the summer and Reese would spend a week with us.

We had so many good times, meals, adventures, that I have a plethora of memories that include all of us. I could fill pages and pages with those memories, some that would make you howl with laughter, some that would touch your heart, some that are almost unbelievable and each and every one would include both Bill and John.

Since Bill died, the visits have been infrequent and different and now, they‘ll become different again. Like me, Dianne is a strong woman and when Bill died after a long illness, she continued on with her life, maybe not as she’d originally planned, but she continued just as I am now. The two of us continue to have so much in common it amazes me.

I am so looking forward to seeing Dianne (and her family) the next couple of days. I’m looking forward to sharing laughter, food, memories and quite possibly some tears. But, most of all, I’m looking forward to making a new memory, perhaps bittersweet in some fashion, that’s just the two of us “old” widows.