Some of my oldest friends are still my friends. I keep in touch with all of them regularly.
Pat...she would eventually become valedictiorian of our high school class. Pat studied all the time and was not really athletic. I guess you would call her a goodie-goodie. She always played by the rules and never did anything to jeopardize her status. I guess I liked her because she was my intellectual peer and we could talk about anything intelligently. We also competed against each other...it was a challenge to beat her at her own game.
Barb...Barb was my comic relief. Barb loved to laugh and we would spend hours chuckling over all kinds of things. I could be truly goofy with Barb...she knew how to make me laugh hysterically.We both loved the comedy shows of the mid-60's: Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, and Laugh-In! Every morning we would laugh hysterically remembering the jokes of the previous night. Barb was born in the USA of German parents who had moved to Adams after World War II. She was bilingual as her parents spoke German at home.
Fran: Pretty, Fran always had a boyfriend. She had older sisters and she always had a nice selection of clothes that she could borrow. Fran had her own style and I always envied her great clothes-sense. Her dad owned a dairy farm and she lived in a huge house on a hill. It was always fun to go and visit because there was so much room to roam.
Linda: One of six kids, she was the oldest and very responsible. Linda was a giggler and always easy to get along with. She was transplanted into my elementary school in the 6th grade because her class at another neighborhood school was overcrowded. We became friends very quickly.
Bev: My neighbor and confidant. She was a year older but we enjoyed many of the same friends and acquaintances. We played softball on the same team, rode bikes, and went to movies together. The second floor porch on her house was directly on a level with my second floor bedroom. In the summer we often had a string can phone line between the two houses over which we could try to converse. Bev and I also had a secret club for which we wrote a constitution, collected dues, and had a cryptic secret language. We left messages for each other in a hole in a big tree in the Hoosac St school yard. If found, no one could read the words without knowing the code.
Marilyn: Marilyn was my high school athletics buddy. She was a wiz at basketball and we both played together senior year on the girls basketball team. She was a "rover" and I was a "forward". Together we accounted for most of the team's scores. My senior year, 1969-1970, was a transition year for girls basketball. We played half of our games by girls rules (6-man ball) and half by the boys rules (5-man ball). Through Marilyn, I acquired a new set of friends, girls who had gone to Liberty St Elementary School. We were the girls sports editors of the Hi-Tension, the school newspaper, during our senior year. We thought it was unfair that girls received no recognition for sports so we wrote articles about our basketball games and sent them to the local newspaper. To our surprise, when there was room for them, they were published.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Views of Adams, MA
The Friends Meeting House in Adams, MA is a symbol of the first settlers of the town, the Quakers. Located high on the top of a hill, in what is now Maple St Cemetery, it stands preserved as a testimony to Quaker perseverance. Susan B Anthony was a parishioner here. I recently visited and was struck by the simplicity with which the Quakers led their lives. No frills. No decoration. The simplicity was strangely comforting. I enjoyed the feeling.
The quiet of the cemetery was uplifting and I was struck by the view of Mt Greylock that I saw before me. I have seen this view of the mountain so many times. However, the sky was a clear blue and the clarity was reflected in the details visible to the eye.
This photo was taken with the zoom, but it shows the most recent landslide and the war memorial at the top of the mountain. I thought about all of the times I had climbed the mountain as a teenager and the fun we had racing to the top. It was a tough climb on a path that wound its way through the trees and up a rocky ski trail, but the view from the top was worth it.
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