Reconnecting

Forty-five years ago, my friends, Prudy and DeAnn and I drove together from Eastern Idaho to Oregon to our friend Lora's wedding reception. We were young, beautiful and and a little crazy, and we had so much fun together.

We had just met a couple of months before when we were assigned to be roommates at Ricks College. There were four of us at Ricks Hall: Prudy, whom I had met in beauty school during high school, DeAnn, from Burley who later introduced me to my husband, and Lora Jo from Nyssa, Oregon. We were all just dating like crazy, even Lora, who also had a boyfriend back home. Dave had attended Ricks before his mission and was a hotshot on the football team but didn't want to go back to school. He missed Lora a lot. She was beautiful, smart, vivacious, funny, really popular and was dating some of the big men on campus. To avoid losing her, Dave asked Lora to marry him just a few weeks after school started and they were married after the first semester.

We have kept contact ever since we were freshman. We wrote an old fashioned round robin letter. We would get an envelope with a letter from each of us in it, replace our own with an updated one and send it to the next friend. We have 26 children between us, two divorces, a whopping share of difficult children, financial struggles, You know, just life stuff, but we were all committed to keeping in touch with each other. I was the last one married, but even I got married before I graduated from college. That was the Mormon way back then. But remarkably so, we all graduated. First DeAnn and Prudy, before they had a lot of children, then myself, after my divorce, then Lora Jo who got a really late start but is now a school teacher in Washington. We have all done great things. DeAnn, a political conservative, home-schooled all her children and lived on next to nothing with a worse than nothing husband. Prudy, not her husband, owns a popular nursery in Rigby, Idaho, that she bought in shambles and turned around. We are all strong women and have taken our own paths but have remained friends. I have been the worst at keeping touch. My beliefs evolved more liberally than theirs and I feel like somewhat of an outsider but they have all continued to be incredibly kind and inclusive. I think it is quite an accomplishment that we are still involved in each other's lives.

A couple of weeks ago, DeAnn called and said Dave had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the day after he retired as a ditchrider. Then a few days ago she called and said he died. Just went downhill fast and died. We are starting to die.

So Wednesday, DeAnn and I will be meeting Prudy at her house and we will drive together to Royal City, Washington to Dave's funeral. We are old, thick and wrinkled and our youthful craziness has been beat off by life. But we will have fun together.