Visit from Nancy

This is my friend Nancy, visiting from Indiana, walking with the dogs down on the beach.  She and I were office mates in the social service department of the psychiatric hospital in Bangor in the late 60's and early 70's.  We both stopped working and had children at roughly the same time.  Hers came first, just in time for me to borrow her maternity clothes.  Then Carrie inherited Leslie's baby clothes.  She had her second baby, a boy, just before I got pregnant with Jesse.  Our lives continued more or less in tandem for a number of years, full of the stress of little children, unhappy marriages, depression.  We had each other, though, and there were wonderfully intense times of mutual support as well as fun and laughter.  She and her family moved to Indiana when the kids were still little.  We have talked a few times over the years by phone, and somehow remained close despite the lack of contact.  I was delighted to have her actually come to visit.

Our lives have taken strikingly different paths.  We have both divorced (she twice), but otherwise we have little in common besides the past.  She is retired now, but has spent her life building her own business.  She has acquired more money than I will see in my lifetime, travels the world, loves socializing and dating.  Nevertheless our connection was still there and we visited as if we had seen each other yesterday.  She bought two of my paintings to take home with her.  We parted with promises to see each other again in the near future.  That probably won't happen, but I'm so glad we had this time to reconnect.