Time Travel with Facebook
Her Facebook note to me said something like, “Hi. I had a best friend named Heather Dugan who lived on Halligan Avenue with her sisters, Stephanie and Suzanne.” She signed it “Colleen” with a last name I didn’t recognize, but I knew exactly who she was. And just like that, I reconnected with the first “best friend” I ever had, Colleen Post.
Our backyards met at a hedge that we must have brushed past hundreds of times running to the back doors of one anothers’ homes. We gathered hickory nuts from the shagbark that grew in her backyard and played all the little games that young girls play. She chased after birds with me, salt shaker in hand, when I’d heard we might catch one if we could just sprinkle salt on its tail. We ran through lawn sprinklers in the summer and built snowmen in the winter. I remember her dog Fluffy and her older brother Greg -and I remember her brother Greg eating some of Fluffy’s dog food on a dare in their basement.
On our first day of kindergarten we rode side by side on the school bus, peeking out the back window occasionally to make sure our mothers were still tailing behind in a station wagon. Not much later, we learned that the Posts would be moving to Sturgis, Michigan. I still remember how foreign and far away that sounded.
It was my first real heartbreak. I remember the day they moved as a rainy miserable afternoon. I leaned into the drapes of our sliding glass door, sobbing, as first the moving truck and then the family car pulled away from the familiar house on Abbott Avenue. Until then, my saddest moments had been tied to toys and bedtimes.
No matter who lived there in subsequent years, it remained “Colleen’s house.”
She lives in Alaska now. I’m still in Ohio, just a short drive north of the neighborhood she moved away from thirty-nine years ago. I’ve moved a few times since then too. But, I always remembered Colleen. It’s nice to know she has remembered me too…
***What’s your “reconnect” story?
