You may not have even realized I was gone from Newsvine for a few weeks. However, I was busy making memories and enjoying myself. My dearest friend from my childhood came to visit. We happily found each other after many years of being apart.

What a wonderful week it was, to be able to see my friend, after all of these years. We had matured some since we were younger, but we were the same in many ways. We both treasured our childhood memories that we had shared, so much!

The first day she was here, it was almost unbelieveable that we were actually going to be together, again. We went back home where we were both raised as children. It looked so different that it did, then. When we lived there, it was out of town and a very woodsy country place, but now it surrounded by shopping malls and restaurants. A very different neighborhood now.

My childhood home is no longer there, replaced with a business. Her's remains, but it is now a business, and the house was so different inside, that we were both surprised, by how small that big house, is now. The huge yard we played in for so many years of our childhood, was so much smaller that we had recalled it being when we were children.

Some of the homes in the neighborhood were still there, but again, the little road where we rode our bikes as kids, was a much shorter distance than we remembered. Many homes were added, and we had some difficulty finding the ones in which some other friends had lived.

Our stump mountain, that had resulted from road construction, where we climbed and played and made up every scenio, as children, was gone. Everything was flat along the little dirt road. My home was a much shorter distance from hers, than when we were little and it seemed such a long way to walk with our little legs.

We visited our Elementary School, which had been added onto and tried to picture it as it was, when we were the first students to enter it's halls in kindergarten and first grade. The playground was now such a fancy do with amazing playground equipment that did not reflect the simple swings and junglegym we had. We could still see it the way it was, in our minds.

We went to our upper elementary and junior high school, that we had attended, and what was the high school, we moved away from and both of us had never really gone there. The terrace was still there, that our teachers had always warned us never to walk on, as it was two rolling hills with grass that seemed to be so important to them. The old school sits above the small town in which we lived and the old steps, on which we had so often walked downtown, were covered with new steps just leaving a trace of the ones we had happily skipped down.

Again the school had been added to with new rooms surrounding the structure that was so familiar to us. It was now named after my sixth grade teacher. On one end was the place where the giant strides had been and we had laughed and played so innocently, never knowing then, it would be pavement, now, instead of a playground. We tried to find the rooms that we had our 5th, 6th and 7th grade classes in, and it wasn't as easy to remember, as we thought it would be, as they had changed so much.

I think the part of the visit we enjoyed the most was our trip to the local Library. Sounds funny, I know, but it meant so much to us, as we both had gone to kindergarten in the basement of that building while the new elementary school was being built. They were still open and had had just celebrated their 95th anniversary.

We were greeted so enthusiastically by the folks who were now the curators of our old library. They loved our story of our fond memories of our childhood there. We found everything the same but it was filled with books now, where we had started school. It had also been the site of girl scout and brownie meetings from our young days.

There had been a stairway up to a window, where we both had pictures of our groups that met there, and it was gone. We called it the stairway to nowhere. But much remained the same. We were sure that the bathroom and coat room were the same ones that were there so many years ago, when it was our kindergarten room.

We took pictures of the places that we remember so well, and they took pictures of us, as well. We were really pleased that we were treated so well, almost as celebrities.

We could see the carnival from every Labor Day week-end, in our past, in the park surrounding the library, in our minds eye. We walked by the churches we had attended as children, which most now had built a new place to worship.

Our last run was by the place her mother had always taken us swimming. Though the building was there and a bar remained, we couldn't get the ice cream that we had always gotten after we had gone swinmming. It was no longer a public swimming area, but we could look off the deck and picture ourselves swimming and laughing as children in that spot.

Though we did many enjoyable things during the rest of our precious week together, our trip home meant so much to both of us. We both treasured each other's mothers so much. We found it interesting that after we both had lost our mom's so recently, we had found each other and were able to share such beautiful memories of them and our wonderful childhood.

I hope for all of you, with whom I am sharing this story of my dearest friend and our memories, are as fortunate as we have been to have a childhood worth of wonderful memories. Perhaps, you would care to share one or two of them with us.