What are the odds. On the right street, at the right time. Just two minutes either way and my friends from six hours away would never have seen us walking into the parking lot behind the house. The two couples had met four years ago when Bengt and Titti came north to Lorraine and Kjell’s stuga to meet Steve and me. So much fun.

I hadn’t told any friends on the other side of Sweden I was coming. The travel is too much. Sweden is, after all a big country… and after the train problems I just described, It’s not as easy as it should be! And it all seemed pretty safe. It was not as if I was going to run into anyone, right?

But there we were. Off all the towns on all the streets, they had to have had lunch at that restaurant and finished at exactly the right time.  Lorraine and I were just coming home from sending home a package and there they were. We jumped around a bit, hugged a lot and took them home for tea and coffee. We jammed a weekend’s worth of catching up on four years into an hour. We laughed. We cried. We hugged some more. And they got into their car and drove away.

It could not have been a sweeter encounter. And how serendipitous. Forty-five years of love, running into itself on a small street in a small town far away. This woman knew and loved my family and in that odd way of Exchange Students she is my family. Sometimes Peace is the sweetest of surprises!