Long Term Pen Pals

I’m super duper behind on blogging, but I could not leave this event out of the blog.  The picture is a grainy because stupidly, I left my big camera at home, so it was taken with the camera on my iPod.  In the middle of the month, my friend Kimberly and her family were vacationing here, and asked if I wanted to meet up.  Of course!  I wouldn’t have missed going out to eat with Kim and her family!

Kimberly and I became friends at band camp the summer after eighth grade at International Music Camp.  She played horn in F (French horn) and I played the clarinet.  I think we were in the same dorm.  We exchanged addresses, and in the days of pen and paper letters, wrote back and forth to each other constantly.  We were both from super small towns and went to super small schools, and it was just so refreshing to write letters to someone who understood that but wasn’t necessarily in the mix of all the people you spent day in and day out with, every day.  I can thoroughly attest that if I had a big secret, Kim probably knew about it.  Our letters were pages and pages long.  I had made up a system of coded names so I could write about certain boys in my spare time at school without anyone knowing what I was writing about.

Without planning it, we ended up at camp together again the NEXT summer as well, during a completely different week, so it really was kind of astounding how it all worked out.  This time Kim was at music camp for choir, and I was there to study piano, which happened to take place during the same week.  We saw each other every year at state music contest (she was there to hear my most disastrous performances, actually) and completely by chance, we ended up at Citizenship Camp (sponsored by the Farm Bureau) together at the University of Mary too.  You should have heard us shriek in delightful surprise when we accidentally ran into one another.

When we got to college, we started emailing each other, and believe me, she received some lengthy correspondence when I fell in love with my husband who at the time was pursuing someone else.  (Thankfully that didn’t work out and I got to marry him.  Woo hoo!)

Although it’s been awhile since I’ve actually sat down and written a true blue letter to my favorite pen pal (I owe a lot of people letters these days, during the era of having little time to myself), we still keep track of each other on Facebook and mail a Christmas card to one another each year.

Kimberly and her family had driven from North Dakota to spend a weekend here, and ended up hiking to the sea caves the same day as my family (and 11,000 other people .  . . and I’m not making that number up.  It was an official park services statistic for that day).  My kidlets were toasted and it was snowing outside, so I left them home with my husband and headed out down the slippery highway to Clyde Ironworks.  It was so much fun to catch up and meet her kids, who were great, and like my kids would be, were very excited about swimming in the pool at their hotel.

I may just go write my oldest pen pal a letter today.