Kindred Spirits

So I admit, I wasn’t too great at posting much about my trip back to England while I was gone. I believe I did get one or two posts up but that was it. To be honest, there wasn’t really a whole lot to write about, lots of time was spent with family and friends reminiscing. However some great stories were recounted.

My friend Mary and I, who’ve been friends since I was 9, had a great time retelling stories from our childhood. Mary and I were introduced by one of the teachers at school. Mary was a year below me, we were both sort of misfits. I would wander around the school yard looking at the flowers etc and daydreaming. Mary would time herself running back and forth across the playground with her new digital watch. The teacher was right to introduce us, we hit it off right away and have been really good friends ever since. Due to her parents jobs Mary moved around a lot. So after a few years of us being inseparable she moved to another town, not that far away, but far enough (by English standards), for us to only see each other every couple of months. Then of course she moved again, and we saw each other less. In fact in the past 10 years, we’ve seen each other twice. But each time we get together, its like we just saw each other the day before.

Some of the things we did and believed as kids is hilarious now looking back. We had so much hope and determination, we believed that we could save all the animals in the world, we even wrote a book (at the age of 10) on how to save the environment. We developed our own code and wrote “secret” letters to each other. We wrote plays and made up silly games, all the stuff that kids are supposed to do, right. We got up to so much mischief too, and are still amazed that my mum was always aware of what we were up to, and what trouble we’d caused.

For some reason we got to talking about us wearing swimming costumes under our school uniform on the days we had swim class. I remember it always being a right pain, as I had to take off all my clothes when I needed to go pee, Mary made the same comment. Then my other friend, who was also there having dinner with us, asked why we did that… we looked at her as if to say, well what else were we supposed to do. April then said… well you could just push the gusset to one side… so at 29 years of age, I have now learnt that you don’t have to remove a swim suit to go pee. You have no idea how often I have thought to myself, while wearing a wet swim suit that there has to be an easier way, seemingly Mary was the same way... kindred spririts!