For the last couple of years, I've been wondering about a friend of mine from high school. We sat next to each other for three years, and we had a lot of silly fun together, but somehow after varsity we just lost touch. So I've been googling her from time to time, checking on SA Reunited, but never found any trace of her. I discovered that her mom had gone back to England and I had pretty much given up hope of ever making contact again.

Then on Monday I had a reminder from SA Reunited about nothing very important, but it reminded me to have yet another (hopeless) check for her on google. And I found a two-line post to a permaculture mailing list, written late last year, from someone with her name. Just something about the style of those two lines sounded just like her. I SMS'd whoever it was (she'd included her cell phone number which also rang true to her trusting personality!) asking if she was my friend. A couple of hours later I received a very surprised response - it was her!

I was totally stunned. After all these years. She's living in Cape Town. So I phoned a bit later and we exchanged a few words, and home phone numbers (didn't have time for a long chat as we were already late for dinner with friends). She phoned back tonight and we spent more than an hour on the phone catching up on the last 15 years. She's both just the same, and very different, from the girl she was. As am I, I suppose. The years slipped away and we giggled over old memories. Like the course for "Gifted Underachievers" we were both sent on in Standard 9. And the end of term binges we would have when we would purchase such luxuries as coke, chips and biscuits and stuff our faces with them all afternoon. And the Mills and Boon we were determined to write and become rich by. (We spent several afternoons coming up with suitably whimsical names for the heroine and other characters, and then laboriously wrote out pages and pages of Chapter 1. Our dreams of fame and fortune were cut short by our attempt to type out Chapter 1, when we discovered that our entire effort came to approximately 3/4 of a typed page.)