The Morning Sentinel

July 31

Time to reconnect with friend

By Amy Calder acalder@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

As August rolls in, I think about the first friend I ever had, whose birthday is Aug. 2.

It's funny how we remember these things, even though we don't see a person for a long time.

When you're little, something like a birthday is a big deal. Terri and I always remembered each other's birthdays, whether separated by time or place, or just delinquent in keeping in touch.

I met Terri when I was about 4, taking a walk with my grandmother. On these quarter-mile walks, we always stopped at a large apple tree and turned around to go back home.

One day, a little girl with big brown eyes and a pageboy haircut peered out at us from behind the tree.

I looked at her; she looked at me, and from that moment on, Terri and I became inseparable best friends.

We played in the sandbox with her brothers who ate dirt by the spoonfuls (no kidding), climbed apple trees, created fantasy houses with her tiny wicker furniture and read lots of books. Terri was a voracious reader and had an imagination like no tomorrow, and that's one of the things I liked most about her.

We looked alike, and people often thought we were sisters, with our similar height, dark hair, rosy cheeks -- and constant giggling.

We giggled about everything and found humor in things most people disregarded. Terri's father called us a couple of wild monkeys when he took us to a restaurant once and we giggled so much we couldn't stop squirming in our chairs.

After a few years, Terri and her family moved to New Hampshire, but we kept in touch through letters. One summer, my first trip out-of-state, I went down to Dover and stayed at her house at 809 Central Avenue, an address I've never forgotten, we wrote so many letters to each other.

The older I get, the more vivid my childhood memories become and the more frequently the fond ones come to mind. Isn't it interesting how that works?

During that New Hampshire visit, Terri's family packed their suitcases, hitched the boat to the station wagon and drove to Aroostook County on an overnight trip in which we kids slept in the back of the car on a large mattress, with lots of pillows and blankets, the back window open all the way.

I'd never done anything like that before and it was new and exciting. We'd wake up when the car stopped to gas up and giggle at the station attendants who gaped at us through the back window.

We stayed a couple weeks in a small camp at Portage Lake, swimming, fishing, and picnicking with Terri's grandparents, who lived in Ashland. We caught a lot of hornpout and became experts at plucking the thorny fish off the hooks.

Every day was an adventure. One day we took a raft out onto the lake and it blew away in a hefty wind. We imagined ourselves lost, marooned on a desert island and forever separated from our families. We worried ourselves into a panic but somehow managed to paddle back to shore.

That was our second brush with what we believed was certain death. The first time was a few years earlier when we got lost in the woods after being told by my grandmother that we were not to go there as the day was waning and it would be dark soon.

We wandered, petrified, through the woods and fields for what seemed like hours, holding hands and praying hard for someone to discover us. We ultimately found a house a couple of miles away from our starting point and called Terri's father, who, much to our chagrin, was not at all pleased.

Terri and I kept in touch for years and then lost contact until one year my mother got a Christmas card from her saying she lived in a small Massachusetts town, which, it turns out, was about 12 miles from where I lived, in Amherst.

We reconnected, enjoyed reminiscing about old times, visited often. And then, as life would have it, we became separated again by time and place.

Terri lives in Maine now, on the coast, and I've never been to her house, although we speak on the phone every couple of years and threaten to get together.

But it just doesn't seem to happen.

This year, on Aug. 2, I'm going to call her and see if we can arrange that, though.

Life is short and it's time for us to catch up. An old friend -- and the first one, at that -- is too precious to ignore.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 22 years. Her column appears here Saturdays. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com.