Sister From Another Mother

Jen in NYC 1988.

Jennifer is my friend in Santa Fe who has been encouraging me to move down there and become her next door neighbor for the last 15 years.  Our friendship started a decade earlier though in Hartsdale (next stop Scarsdale), New York in 1988.  We had both just graduated from high school in Utah & Nebraska respectively and ended up working as live-in nannies a couple miles from each other.  We met because the nannies who worked in our families' homes before us knew each other and introduced us before the went back to their hometowns.  We were soul-sisters from the very beginning and had so much fun exploring New York City, challenging each others beliefs and having coffee at the diner on the corner.  

Jen was so gregarious and outspoken that I'd often turn around to find her talking to strangers on the street - that's her talking to a guy about his bike near Washington Square Park.  I was shy by comparison and admired her brave heart and curious nature.  She just loves people in a way that still seems foreign to me.  Don't get me wrong, I like people and no one I know has would ever call me shy, Jen just exudes a joie de vivre that only an former Mormon with Italian blood running through her veins can radiate.

I moved back to the Midwest after my year in New York and Jen stayed in New York with her family for another year.  We kept in touch over the years though & I visited her in Washington state in the mid 90s.  Then she moved to Santa Fe in 1999.  

I don't remember which came first, Jen moving to Santa Fe or my love for the place.  I do know that I didn't waste any time hitting the road with 7 year old son in tow to visit her that year.  I hadn't traveled very much and loved the drive across country and beautiful landscape of New Mexico from the first time I saw it from I-25.  I remember seeing sage brush for the first time and thinking that the sage color in my Crayon box didn't do it justice.  I've always been fascinated by adobe architecture and felt right at home under the Big Sky that I found there too.  The light and the air there even seems special and magical to me.  It was definitely love at first site, just like when I met Jen for the first time.

Jen & me in Santa Fe 2003.

I always felt a bit like a square peg in a round hole here in Nebraska.  I'm not a football fan and my interests in "new age" and "alternative" topics have garnered me a more than a few blank stares over the years.  But, in Santa Fe I felt like I'd found my true home.  People understood my language and I'm probably a little conservative by The City Different's standards.  Jen understands me though and has always championed my causes and we've often discovered that we were pursuing similar interests at the same time without having talked to each other about it first.  Our great minds have always thought alike.

In a few short months, Jen & I will once again be living in the same city and I can't wait to turn around and find her talking to strangers again as we hike the trails with our dogs and manifest a fabulous new adventure, together, in The Land of Enchantment.  

See ya soon, Sis!