Friends.Lovers.Soulmates. Chapter 1

I can barely remember a time when I wasn't friends with Lover. His family moved to my city when I was just three years old, and our families became great friends shortly thereafter. Lover is the youngest of four children, and I am the oldest of four. That worked out perfectly to put us both very close in age. I have three brothers, so I've always been more comfortable around guys than girls, and it wasn't long before Lover and I were fast friends.

As I said, our families were also best friends (my second brother was named Jonathan David because of the friendship between our fathers) so we spent a lot of time together. And when I say a lot, I mean hours upon hours. The best memories I have of that time are playing games at our house, dressing up like some sort of crazy hobo people, and reading lots of books together.

When Lover 's family came over for dinner, the running joke was trying to figure out how many times his dad would say “all right kids, time to go!” before he was actually serious and they had to get their coats. Once we counted 16 times. We never complained, because it always gave us more time to spend together.

Lover's family moved to Spain a few years later. As five and six year olds, our primary concern in this move to another continent was how we would keep in touch. That still makes me laugh. Truth be told, I was devastated to be losing my friend, and so we came up with an ingenious solution. A secret code! With two older sisters, and my nosy little brother, we knew that we didn't stand a chance of privacy unless our letters were “Top Secret.” This was back in the days of airmail, when you sent all your letters, written on super thin paper, in one envelope to save on postage. And so the code was born. Here is our code breaker,



You'll notice that there are important words on there; horse, America, orphan(?), parents and steel. I'm sitting here, twenty years later, trying to figure out why we would have needed to talk about steel in our 6 year old letters. Hehe. Anyways, we did use the code, for quite a while. Here is one of Lover 's letters to me back then.



He explains that you can indeed grill in Spain, but you have to go out to the country. He also asks about my new baby brother's name (my second brother). Oh, and in Spain the weather is hot. :-) I love these letters. They are all so silly and quirky.

And so, for the first year that Lover lived in Spain, we exchanged letters and talked on the phone once in a very great while. And then my parents gave me the greatest news ever – WE were going to Spain to visit Lover!

To be continued...