Old Friends: 9

A lot has been going on here this week, what with my daughter arriving home from Maine and leaving the next day for a short stay with her friend on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And the whole family is getting ready to leave for a week plus on the farm. In fact, we'll be picking Natalie up somewhere along the way as we drive down to North Carolina from Connecticut, and the family she's with drives up from NC to CT.

Last week, John got a surprise email from an old friend, Deborah. She and John go way back to those crazy-friendship days you have in your early 20s. You know, the kinds of friendships you make in college and graduate school when anything is possible, and everything is new--and usually hilarious. It's all about sharing horrible dinners you cook yourself in some pan you found in the neighbor's trash, helping each other build bookshelves out of cinderblocks and old boards, and, well, other things that I just won't get into right now. But John and Deborah were friends in the city when John was at NYU and I've heard a lot about this group of pals over the years. I even met Deborah once a long time ago. John and Deborah have stayed in touch on the once-every-few-years level, and this email was just a hey-how-ya-doin' kind of thing.

John decided to answer with the news about FarmFront, and to his great surprise, got a most enthusiastic reply from Deborah. It seems that she's interested in sustainable living too, and even owns some land about an hour away from the farm, so now they're talking. She knows about straw bale houses, log end houses, and solar houses (hmmm--there's a bit of a Three Little Pigs thing going on there, if you think about it) and seems to spend a lot of her time growing things. We're hoping to get to see her while we're in North Carolina. By the way, she mentioned a story about an "attack goose" on the farm that is going to require some looking into.

I'm a huge Paul Simon fan, and always liked the Simon and Garfunkel song, Old Friends. At 16, I was completely overwhelmed by the touching image of two really, really old ("...how terribly strange to be 70...") people, sitting next to each other on that park bench, useless "bookends" living on borrowed time. Seventy! Hey, seventy is the new 40. So now I see it a little differently. Maybe 70 will be a time we spend in our state-of-the-art, sustainable house, keeping in shape with a little work outdoors, and book-ended by lots of people just like us--and who knows? Maybe even by some old friends.