I recently spent most of the afternoon plowing through old columns and found this one I wrote a decade ago about my grandmother. I thought you’d like it since it is about the wonder of friendship.
Friendship is something that can bridge the barriers of time and leap over the bonds of distance. True friendship is enduring, forgiving, endless, and wonderful.
Almost 15 years ago I spent two months back home in Montana. Much of that time was spent interviewing my 87-year-old grandmother, Pearl Geeslin Smith.
One bright, sunny afternoon we were talking about friends and she told me an interesting story about her childhood. I want to share it with you.
Just as Tom Sawyer had Huckleberry Finn, six-year-old Pearl Geeslin had Margaret “Muggy” Knowles. They were best friends.
Muggy and Pearl were the same age, born in 1898, and they were too filled with the enchantment of childhood to realize the hardships of growing up in rough, raw, Whitefish, Montana. Their fathers worked together in a sawmill and both families lived in rugged, slab-sided cabins provided by mill owners. Muggy had an older brother and Pearl was the youngest of a brood of seven.
Both girls lived carefree lives and spent hours playing with dolls or walking along Whitefish Lake picking up beads and arrowheads left by the Indians who spent summers camped in teepees along the lake. The girls had been taught by their mothers to sew and spent rainy days turning scraps of cloth and snippets of ribbon into dresses and bonnets for their dolls. The two were always glad to be together, to laugh and share. For Pearl those were happy golden years, the years she and Muggy were friends. But Pearl’s happiness ended abruptly when she was only six. At age 42, her father died of a heart attack.
Faced with seven children, no income and no future, Pearl’s mother had no choice but to send Pearl and her brothers Tom and Harry to the state orphanage in Twin Bridges. They traveled by train, accompanied by a matron. Harry was taken in by a farm family who needed a hand.
The carefree days of childhood changed to a time of agonizing homesickness. Orphanage rules didn’t allow Pearl to talk to her brother except for an hour on Sundays. She remembered standing by a picket fence—watching him as he walked in lines to and from school, the tears running down her cheeks.
Mary Geeslin took in washing and eventually married a notoriously cranky old man. After a year, the children were brought home and Pearl had further heartbreak when she learned Muggy had moved. Then, that loss was shoved to the side when her two older boxcar-riding brothers were killed in a train derailment.
The years rolled on and when she was 17, Pearl met Roger Smith, a tall, handsome young man with a quick and charming smile. They were married and had five children.
Throughout those years Pearl still thought about her friend Muggy and wondered what had happened to her. She was such a bright spot in Pearl’s bleak childhood memories. Decades piled up, but those memories were still vivid.
One evening, when she was 86, Pearl happened across an announcement of a golden wedding anniversary to be celebrated by Margaret Knowles Isaacs and her husband in a town 15 miles away. The years of wondering were finally over. After 80 years, the two were reunited and rekindled the friendship. Until death parted them again, they spent many happy hours remembering back to when they were Muggy and Pearl and Whitefish was young and as rough and as unfinished as an uncut diamond.
Friends are blessings from God. Treasure them as such and take time to tell yours how much they mean to you.
