(Judy, Ray, Me)

Old friends, old friends
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Can you imagine us years from today
…

How terribly strange to be 70 [80] [90]

…

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears

…

Old friends.

I’m an introvert…often thought of as avoiding or being less connected to people than the average human being. Not true. Introverts simply aren’t fond of groups, gatherings, crowds, masses. We are happiest with one, or two, or possibly three, friends at a time.

Without ever slighting the importance of family as being at the heart of who we are, I want to honor friends as making up a great part of everything we become.

This post was intended for few summer photos of Minnesota friends. With this blog as journal, I feel compelled to document everything energy allows in word and picture. And as I scrolled through photos, it came to me once again, how absolutely vital to our lives, friends are or can be. Sometimes family provides all of the human and world experiences we desire. But, for many of us, friends enhance and expand our whole, hopefully long, lives. For brother Robert and me, the latter is, or often appears to be, true.

About Robert and me and our friends. Personal friends, buddies. The ones whom you admire and with whom you share secrets and agonize over when all goes south; the ones who have fleshed out whole areas of your life. You know, they’ve known you since … always, it feels like—and still care about and are a little bit interested in what you think and actually have fun with you. A select few of those friends were right there with us up north this summer.

Making getting older and older both more doable and even adding a bit of joy to the process.

The following photos are from a gathering at Robert and Marsha’s, celebrating friend Barb’s 80^th birthday. They have all known each other for varying lengths of time, but here’s an important point for right now. Robert and Marsha are really (they say) moving this year to warmer climes, forever abandoning Minnesota and winter. The friends who follow represent some of why that is such a hard decision. They include friends from 50 years ago and from 15 years ago. You really can’t replace 50 years of friendship easily and you certainly can’t replace moving into a new place and finding out, with great relief, your one close neighbor loathes the same political fraudsters you do. It’s had to replace that kind of human security.

And sharing my summer’s Minnesota adventure, friends from early school days (also known as a very long time ago).

Here’s where I want to further explain what I mean about family being our heart and soul (if we’re lucky) and friends being some of that and part of everything else about our lives.

Among my friends are those who have literally and figuratively shared my chilly Minnesota childhood and those who have traveled the world with me, broadening everything about my lived experience. They have kept me connected to childhood days of sharing secrets, big and small, and playing in the snow, and to stumbling on Greenlandic rocks, and to talking ageing bodies, books, and (being tutored in) music over coffee, via zoom and messenger and email. I simply cannot imagine my life without every single one of my friends, some passed these last years, most in the very present majority.

Just a photo or two from my slightly abbreviated summer trip, originally intended to include additional oldfriends, but for now more than perfectly represented by Judy and Ray, especially Judy whom I’m pretty sure has been a friend from as early as the 4^th grade. After spending my first three years of school at a tiny country school called Haupt, upon its closure I was transferred to a big city school (Northome, population at the time, 300+), and Judy was there then or soon thereafter. And a year or so later, Ray appeared in our 6^th grade year in the nearby village of Mizpah (part of a cohort of evil boys pushing the girls down in the snow…as I remember it).  Now that is a while ago. Let’s say a minimum of 75 years ago. That’s not so easy to replace even if one has moved as often or lived as faraway from home (Minnesota) as I have.

Talk about expanding the breadth and length of one’s life. Breadth in the sense, for me, of a grounding in the green and blue of northern forest and lake, living much of my life in the high desert of New Mexico, and visiting streets of Cape Town and steppes of Mongolia. One obviously doesn’t need to travel far geographically to find significant markers; for me though, with my first book love being an old geography text of my mom’s, distance counts. Which brings me back to where it all began…and where it will end with my ashes, the Northwoods.

Length. That’s even more important to me right now. How to note, satisfactorily to myself, that I’ve lived a long and interesting life. Go back to the beginning…and only then check in with this abominably sunny New Mexican day in my present state of old ladyhood. In the beginning…there was mom and dad on the tiny farm at the end of a gravel lane in Koochiching County, Minnesota. And that geography book. And some dogs and a friend named Susie and a brother named Robert and school and schoolfriends, one of whom was named Judy.

See how this family and friend thing works.

So, forgive me if I’m being a bit sentimental. If not at this age, when?

Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears

(Thanks Paul Simon.)