The Road Less Traveled

Today, I travel down a different road. Right at this very moment in time I am focusing on a great regret. In my many visits to my daughter in Washington state, I have tried to find two old friends, but to my chagrin, I wasn't able to locate them. I met these two women as a teenager and went through high school and college and weddings with them. They were closer to me than my brother and sister. This time I paid a small fee to a web site that advertised it could find anyone in the USA.

True to their word, they did pinpoint one of my friends and she lives just up the road a few miles. The reunion has been remarkable - just like we were never separated. We've done a lot of catching up on the last 42 years. Like typical women, we've laughed, cried, and joked over shared remembrances and new discussions. It really feels good to find someone who has traveled a similar road. Someone who knows that heartache can and has turned into some of the best and worst memories we have. Tempered by time and retrospection we have been able to winnow the good from life's difficult challenges.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate our other friend. We both began to look and neither of us could find an accurate address for her. In the mean time, I signed up for our church's website. I was looking up information on my extended family when I got the inspiration to put my lost friend's name in the information space. I hit return and her name came up. I was ecstatic until I noticed in the vital statistics that she had passed away. I began to cry when I saw that she had passed away just a month before I had the means to find her. I tried to find information on her death and burial site but only found a small death notice. I was so close but now so far away.

I am a Christian and do believe in life after death. I hope that my friend, her husband and my husband have found each other and are rejoicing over found friends as my friend and I are here.

Me