It’s so sweet having good friends scattered over this country. There is much to be grateful to the Rotary Exchange Program for!
It’s always seemed weird that these separate little worlds don’t know one another. Well, my friend Lorraine knows everyone, because either we lived in the same town for a while, or people have come through Kristinehamn (K-hamn) and stopped to see me at Lorraine’s house. Altogether, it’s a pretty fine thing.
But this week, there was a little breakdown. Margita, in whose house I lived in K-hamn when I was here, came to Fjällbacka to pick me up at Margareta’s summer home. They’d never met before. Marg had lived at my family’s when my brother was an exchange student in Mönsterås in 1967-68. So there were Marg and her daughter Katarina and her boyfriend Mikke. (We were all sort of collapsed in heat after the cake party for Marg’s name day. Yep, gotta celebrate not just your birthday, but your name day as well. More cake. And this was right in the middle of — don’t you love this — housewife week, when one often has cake parties. But hey, it’s cake. I can slide right over the political correctness!)
But Margita came and we went and got pizzas and clambered aboard Marg’s boat and whisked ourselves out to an island in the middle of this rocky bay. Oh, the water was amazing, cool and refreshing. Nothing like the time i was there with my parents and the water was well… frrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeezing comes to mind! But Betty went in, so we all did, squealing all the way!
Ah, it was nice to have those edges meet. so sweet, so sweet. sisters of my heart. Marg’s very clear about being my “big” sister, because she has me by a year. And since I’m, shall we say, down one big sister, i’ll take it! Sweet, wonderful crazy time.
Worlds colliding and enjoying one another. Isn’t that what we have to learn to do? To sit at one another’s house and eat cake and on one another’s boat and eat pizza and to laugh, to laugh, to laugh. If the Rotary know this… shouldn’t everyone! This isn’t a secret to keep, this is a sacred truth to shout aloud!
