From my road to Princess Avenue

Thursday's run,  5/27/10
Time:  6:40 am    Temp: 69 degrees
Humidity:  91%   Distance: 3 miles total

I suppose it's ok to call my time outside on the road a "run" isn't it?  I mean, I do run part of the time.  Actually 12 minutes worth at this point.  Within this 3 miles there are 6-2 minute run intervals.  If I plan it well, I'm able to do them on my road.  If I really plan well, I do them without being hit by a car!  I actually struggle to choose the time of day based on my being awake and mobile (two very different things), The Cowboy's plans, the heat/humidity factor, and traffic patterns when deciding to do this.  Not an easy task.

However, Thursday's run time was a no brainer.  I had a special morning planned.  So I was up and out the door before I was awake.  Unbelievable that the humidity was 91% at 6:40 in the morning and no breeze "atall"...not a puff.   Good grief!  But it was worth it.  Here's why.

My special morning was with a long lost friend.  Diane J lived across the street from me when we were tiny girls.  She was a year younger than me, little (to my big 5 year-old-ness) and blonde so I thought she was beautiful.  She became "Little Diane" to everyone in the neighborhood since we also had another Diane that was older (Love you, Di!).  She was a delight to me because she was younger!...all the other girls on the block were older.  I had an older brother and she had two.  I think we relished our time together just to get away from the boys!

Facebook brought us together again.  I think my brother connected with her brother Bob, and then we found one another that way. We've been chatting for about a year and discovered that she's passed my way every Memorial Day recently to visit friends in Tennessee.  This year, she and her husband, Wayne, stopped to say hello.  We met for breakfast at Bob Evan's then drove out to the farm. We swapped stories.  She remembers playing dolls under our picnic table (we had a picnic table?) before getting hit by her brother's baseball bat and sitting on my mother's lap on the way to the hospital for stitches.  I remember getting my own head busted open when that same big brother threw a rock at my brother, missed him, and hit me. Aaaaahhh...childhood.

Diane's family moved a few miles away when she was seven.  She was in a different school district, so we never saw one another again as girls.  She remembers me as an adult coming in to the bank one time where she worked while I had a child in tow.  I don't remember that at all.  (The lack of memory thing is beginning to get to me.)  We both remember all the kids (Stortz=5, Jurewicz=3, Bristow=5 between two families of them, Pheifer=2, Paul Kemmer, Vicki Bush around the corner, and others farther down the block) who made our block of Princess Avenue a place where you could always find a friend.  I'm glad to have found mine again.  Come again, Little Diane.