Four In One: Towering Trees

A perfect home for my dear friend. 

Once upon a time, I was a little girl growing up in Michigan lake country. All around the little cluster of homes that was my neighborhood, lay a friendly collection of woodlands. My friend Marilyn, who was three years older and ever so much wiser, and I spent countless hours of our early childhood playing in those woods. Oh, we built horse jumps and cleared a little homes beneath the sheltering arms of soaring oaks and hickories where we reenacted the homesteading adventures of the Little House books. On other days, we were the Boxcar Chikdren children, each of us having to play dual roles to cover all four characters among the two of us. (She was Henry and Jessie; I played Violet and Benny.) We picked pretend wild cucumbers and stored them away as pickles, and ate the real tiny, wild strawberries that grew on the hillside behind my house, warm in the morning sun. We investigated a rather large hole up that same hill, dug by a pair of local teenage boys in their best attempt to excavate a foundation for the home they were itching to build but apparently abandoned. We promptly renamed it the Bear Pit.  Although we were never too far from home, our mothers gave us tremendous freedom to play out in the woods for hours on end, and the effect was magical. There’s no doubt that these hours spent playing, imagining, and exploring among the towering trees are at the heart of who I am today.

Then Marilyn and her family moved away. At first, they settled  early, not much more than 10 miles away and our families were able to visit now and then. 

But a few years later, they made a much bigger leap to upstate New York, where they stayed permanently. My friendship with Marilyn faded into memory and I was left to explore the woods on my own.

Fast forward to August 2017. My husband, my dog and my youngest daughter and I had just taken a trip to Wyoming to view a dazzling solar eclipse and I returned home with stars in my eyes. And what  should I find in my mailbox but a letter from my long lost friend Marilyn. A miracle every bit as grand as the eclipse. 

In the years since then, Marilyn and I have renewed our happy friendship, this time as penpals. i’ve dreamed many times in these last few years of reconnecting in person, but how often does one get a chance to travel from the Pacific Northwest to upstate New York? Ever the optimist, I held out hope that circumstances might somehow bring us together, but I didn’t expect any miracles.

But just when you stop expecting miracles, that’s when they begin to take shape. Last winter when I received the invitation to my niece’s wedding in the Catskills, my brain followed a hunch. A quick Google search informed me that Marilyn lived just 90 miles north of the wedding venue. Huzzah!!

So that is how it came to be that on the morning after my niece’s wedding, I found myself jumping out of our rental car, crunching across the stones of a gravel driveway, and enjoying a heartfelt hug from my long lost friend, Marilyn. 

And much to my delight, Marilyn’s 200 year old farmhouse as well as her barns, fields, and woodland ponds did much to reassure me that Marilyn is still very much a woman of the woods. As she led me here and there about her property, showing me where the ducks nest and the deer graze, which shrubs are thriving and where the pond needs shoring up, I felt as though our friendship has been perfectly preserved over the years. Our shared passion for playing, imagining, and exploring in the woods is very much alive and well, and as my old friend Marilyn led me around her groves and stands of towering trees, my heart felt as if I had finally come home.