Sunset and evening star

We met in third grade so we’ve been friends for 45 years. I’ve written before about Outdoor Girl and some of our high school experiences: how we used to take breaking in new jeans seriously and how we went winter camping in the mountains or how we spent hours after school just wandering the halls. Her family matched mine – five kids roughly the same ages. My mother and her father were friends as well: they shared a love of birdwatching and went to Audubon meetings together.

As a teenager, I spent many hours at Outdoor Girl’s house. Like most big families, they had two bedrooms for the kids, a boys’ room and a girls’ room, but she and I would grab sleeping bags and sleep downstairs in the sewing room, so that we could stay up and talk all night. Her family had a long red toboggan that we took on the hills in Snowstorm City, back in the days before the parks banned sledding because someone decided it was too dangerous. They had a yellow canoe, which was almost always tied to the roof of their station wagon. “It makes it easy to find our car in any parking lot,” her mother joked once. Her father did as much gardening as he could in their small backyard: he had apple trees and little raised beds of vegetables.

Their house was familiar and comfortable. The long bench along the kitchen table made it possible for extras to squeeze in, and I ate many meals there. I can remember Outdoor Girl’s father showing me how to use a spoon to twirl long spaghetti around my fork. (We always ate ziti at my house.) On weekends, he’d make us French toast for breakfast: their family used maple syrup instead of butter and cinnamon sugar like my family. Just behind the long table was the family room, where we kids would sprawl on the floor with pillows. I can remember that when we watched the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Outdoor Girl’s father liked it so much that he applauded at the end.

Outdoor Girl moved away from this area right after college, but I go over to visit whenever she comes to town to see the family. It’s always easy to pick up the friendship: she hasn’t changed much. Her hair is white, her kids are grown-up, and she’s acquired a southern accent from living in a southern rural area for so long, but otherwise she’s just the same. She still loves to be outside: she and her husband are farmers.

Last weekend, Outdoor Girl came to town for her father’s funeral. Even though we’ve known for a while that he was dying, it still seems a shock to me that the good-natured, gentle man I’ve known for so many years is gone. Often, I used to see him at Pretty Colour Lake, standing at the edge with a fishing pole. He’d look up, smile a hello, and tell me all the family news. He was a gentle, good-natured, thoroughly nice person. He was 84, and that still seems too young. I know his family is going to miss him.