“My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds
that rise from the lake to the trees…..to sing
through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.”
The Sound of Music, Rogers and Hammerstein
My suitcase is almost packed. In the words of John Denver, “I’m leaving on a jet plane.” But unlike the lyrics in his song, I DO know when I’ll be back again. I leave July 3 and I’ll be back again on July 15.
Where am I going?
I’m going to dance in the Austrian mountain meadow field where Julie Andrews musically enjoyed all the earthly glories of God in Sound of Music.
This will happen on Day 5 of a twelve day tour through the Alps where we will touch “up and down” 4 countries and a principality:
Germany, Austria Italy, Switzerland, and Leichenstein. I’ve even learned how to spell the name of that tiny principality.
But there is nothing tiny about this trip.
First, it is a trip that is given to me by my friend, Martha. Our friendship has spanned forty five years, since our early married days. We were neighbors who played together with our children and other neighbors in our Lexington Kentucky days.
It was the middle sixties; Martha had two sons, we had two daughters, and they played together in our safe triangular shape of four yards that all ran together.
Along with our children, Martha and I grew, wondered and processed all the changes of consciousness and human growth that were “in the air” at that time, so along with traditional stay-at-home motherhood values, we enjoyed the emerging new persons we were both becoming. It is a friendship that led to deep bonding.
Then by the mid ’70s some rather big changes began to develop in both our family lives. Unrest, namely, by both our spouses, in the way they were earning their livelyhood, formed through their college training.
My Tom wanted out of mid-management in his field; her Joe wanted out of pharmacy. He went back to college and earned a PhD in another field; Tom took a “leave of absence” from a Blue Chip Corporate company, never intending to return. We sold our home and moved to Chicago to determine how to create what was next in our life.
I was not singing at that time in 1976. Martha came over the night before we would be leaving with UHaul, Pop-up camper, and car with our two young daughters and our black cat, Fritzi.
Martha said, “I’m not even going to watch you pull out of your driveway, this is good-bye.” The pain of separation was huge.
Well, life went on. Martha and Joe moved onto St. Louis, Martha went back to school and got her Masters in Social Work, and eventually moved down to Florida where she would be near her parents, working many more years in her field setting up discharge and supportive services for the elderly in hospitals.
We have “picked up the phone” to check in on one another at amazingly synchronistic times…like our friendship has a vibration that communicates across time and geography which is the only thing that separates us now. We have visited briefly across the years, but it is mainly the bond we each feel that has kept us connected and vital to each other. We’ve shared joys and sorrows and moved on, each in our own way.
This year, in February, I was enjoying some Saturday night leisure time with Tom in my lounge chair in front of the TV. I was probably reading my Kindle rather than paying much attention to the TV.
The telephone rang. It was Martha. She told me she was just going to “throw something out there” and I should think about it and tell her if I wanted to do it. She then told me she was inviting me to accompany her to the Swiss Alps, all expenses paid. Would I come, she asked.
I didn’t have to think too long. And the second part of this gift is that she sounded so excited and even surprised that I said a quick “yes, when do we go?” response.
So we are ON….two girlfriends, twelve days… five countries, three days in the birthplace and music of Mozart, mountain tops, meadows, and villages, first class travel and hotels…..
oh, you should hear me singing now!
Napkinwriter 