Growing up I had quite a few penpals (shocking I know) but one of them in particular turned into one of my favourite friends. I met her in the summer between grades 6 and 7, at a hotel in downtown Toronto while my mom and I were moving from one house to another. It was a fun week of big city adventures, made all the more awesome by meeting my new friend, who was in town from Windsor, doing family things. We hit it off right away and had some great adventures and when the week was up we swapped addresses, as kids did in those days. It was the start of a friendship that would span the rest of our elementary school and most of our high school days. We wrote religiously, visited each other at least twice a year but eventually, as a lot of long distance relationships do, the letters started to be fewer and fewer. By the time we hit college/university we weren't writing. She did ring me up once in my last year of college, and we had a great chat. But that was it. I used to think of her every now and then, and when the whole facebook/internet phenomenon took off I would search for her every now and then, but never found her. I was a bit sad, I wished we had never grown apart.
Then there came etsy. Now, if you google my name most of the hits are either from when I used to play hockey, or my etsy shop. And that's exactly what happened. One morning I woke up to an etsy convo message from her. She had found me!!! I was so excited I literally jumped up and down. Now, it seems she sent that message right before leaving on a big European trip so she didn't respond to me message until months later (which is right now). It was painful waiting for it. Literally everyday I was checking to see if she'd responded yet. But finally she did and we are planning to finally meet-up and do some serious catching up. Serious. Catching. Up. I'll be sure to share it all with you, of coarse.
The power of the written word. Through all those years, and all those letters we were such good friends. not to knock the power of the internet, you just don't make the same bonds with 140 characters.
It isn't a Monday, but I'm going to leave you with another awesome 80's ending... because this was the big hit the summer we met, and it's been our song ever since (apparently her husband even bought her the record, as she's always referred to it as the Michelle song)
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