One of the hardest things about the area where we lived before moving to this house, was that it was very transitional for most people. Families came for schooling, a job, or a career boost and then moved as soon as they had accomplished that goal. Big sister A has had at least 4 "best" friends in her life, all of whom have moved away. Now that we are on the farm, we are finally able to make friends with people who have no plans of moving soon. That has made me appreciate how lucky I was as child to have had my best friend E.E. nearby almost all of my growing up years. Our moms are best friends and the siblings in our families line up neatly by age and gender. They lived 2.3 miles (I just looked it up) from our house. Once we had a snow day from school and mom let P and I WALK to their house so that we could play together.
A lot of my childhood memories feature E.E. In the story about making the "Secret Garden" in the woods behind our house -- she was often there helping me. She was also a frequent creek adventurer. E's family was homeschooled most of the time. They said funny things like "belt seat" instead of "seatbelt" and "mazagine" instead of "magazine". They had cool station wagons -one with a blue interior and a wide seat facing out the rear window that I loved sitting in. I still remember when they came over one day to show us their new brown station wagon that talked. I got E in a lot of trouble with my love of bubblegum (Bubblicious). She was not allowed to have it (her mom said that people who chewed it looked like cows). But I always convinced her to try it and we frequently got caught.
I am certain that I learned half of my negotiation skills begging for and arranging sleepovers and activities with E. We saw each other at every church activity, all the time in the summer, and on most holidays during the school year. I liked her house because her family had special foods like potato chips and soda (which they called "pop") that we never had. They had this huge old apple tree in the backyard that we loved to climb. It had wide spreading branches, enough branches for each of the big kids to have their own spots. Their mom would make us pbj sandwiches cut on the diagonal (very special) with chips and let us eat them outside by the tree. Eventually their dad also built them a treehouse/fort that was our special talking place. We had a "spy club" for awhile with spy kits in a box that we each made and carried around. Their family also had great taste in movies. It was at E's house that I watched amazing classics like "Around the World in 80 days" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". I think seeing all of E's dad's artifacts from Africa was part of my inspiration for wanting to go there when I got older.
Even though we saw each other all the time, I remember at a certain age we started hiding out in the mother's nursing room at church to talk about the events of the week. One year for halloween we convinced our moms to make us matching genie costumes and of course we had to trick-or-treat together. Every summer, we hung out together. They swam in the pool at our house and we spread our towels out on the black asphalt driveway together to get warm. For awhile she went to gymnastics every Saturday morning with me. She hurt her back at one point and had to quit though.
As we got older we stayed friends and E eventually started going to school. We were in the same school when she was in 7th and I in 8th grade. We had a special notebook that we passed back and forth. We learned Egyptian hieroglyphics and used them as a code to write secret messages to each other... I think I will stop there, as those are most of the early childhood memories that come to mind off the top of my head! Ha!
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