Four Thousand One Hundred and Fifty-Two Miles

We don’t write letters anymore.
It’s been years since we’ve taken our pen to that onion skin airmail paper, the one that folded into itself. A defined space to fit all the words we had to share.
I would seal them up and post through the letter box at the corner of the street. A short walk to send my thoughts flying through the air.
You had further to go to get your message to me. A drive into town in your dad’s pickup truck, standing in line at the mailing office so you could hand it over. You lived in a small wild place and everyone knew I was your friend.
Remember how it all started? Of course you do. Me too!
Though the precise date of our first communication has long since been lost, it’s enough that we know we were twelve years old. Born the same year, a few months apart, and separated by four thousand and one hundred and fifty-two miles.
I was a Girl Guide in Scotland, and you were a Girl Guide in Canada. We had both applied to the Girl Guiding Pen Pal Scheme. Long since defunct, the scheme matched us together and so began our friendship.
I still have some of the letters you wrote. I don’t quite know how the others were lost, for they were always too important to discard. I expect you are the same. Though nowadays you have far less space for possessions and it’s of no matter if they have gone.
Our first letters were filled with the chatter of innocents. We shared the details of our lives, stories of family and school and Girl Guides, taking fascinating pleasure in how different our worlds were.
We were at an age when the novelty of a pen pal might soon wane, yet we kept going all through our school years. Sometimes the standard airmail letter was not enough so we wrote on sheets of thin paper, supplemented with photographs, packed into an envelope. You weren’t the only one then who had to make a special trip to the post office to pay the correct mailing charge.
We had never once spoken aloud, yet our voices were clear. We knew each other, we understood each other, and we trusted each other. There was always something to write about.
At eighteen, I moved from the Fife town where I lived to go to university in Edinburgh. It was exciting and absorbing. Your life was changing too. While I was studying history you were getting married, having your first baby.
For a while, our letters were separated by time and space. People say that with a real friend, there can be periods when you do not or cannot get together but when you meet up after a month, a year, two years or more, you simply pick up where you left off. That was us. The only difference, our meetings were in words.
More years went by. We wrote, sometimes a lot, sometimes less so. We had never met and still our friendship endured.
I will never forget the first time I heard your voice.
You made the call across those four thousand miles from British Columbia to Scotland. My last letter to you had told of the loss of my brother, sharing the shock and the grief of it all. You knew instinctively that your words could not wait for a letter because that’s what a true friend does. They open their arms and their heart and hold, hold, hold on tight.
As I write this now, although I feel the prick of a painful memory, I find myself smiling at the ease and warmth of our conversation. It led to a plan which came to fruition two years later. We met! Face to face. We hugged, we laughed, we talked and talked like old friends do.
I travelled with my husband from our Edinburgh city flat to your home, a log cabin house surrounded by woods and hills. We stayed with you, your husband and your two lovely boys and you took us on a Canadian adventure. Bear trails, salmon fishing, heritage and history, barbeques of hunted meats. Forests, lakes, rivers and mountains. I still have all the photos.
It was a trip of a lifetime, but for all the excitement, the best part was you and me. Two friends who naturally moulded together, in carefree chatter and comfortable silences.
That trip was twenty-nine years ago. Our lives have changed so much since then. How did we both become sixty years old? Will we ever meet face to face again?
You are still the wilderness girl, at home with the high peaks, the fast-flowing rivers and living simply with your beloved dog.
As for me, I moved, with my husband and our dog, from our urban life to the rural northeast of Scotland. Now we have our own mountain view.
We don’t write letters anymore. We don’t send photos in the post.
Instead, news of our lives is shared through the filter of social media. Pictures on Instagram, posts on Facebook, chats on WhatsApp. Still a card at Christmas though!
We don’t write letters anymore but that doesn’t matter.
This friendship, sown long ago with tentative, simple, seedling words, is forever connected by four thousand, one hundred and fifty-two miles of braided roots, tightly twisted, strong and unbreakable.