Frank and I are in Colorado with my college roommate Deb and her husband Charlie, in Rocky Mountain National Park, where every place one looks fills the soul.

Deb and I have been friends for 52 years, ever since we met our freshman year in college. I was a timid, brown-haired, piano-playing girl determined to learn everything I could about everything in the world. Deb was a glowing, giving, curly-headed brunette with an outstanding lyric soprano voice. We lived next door to each other in the dorm. After the first semester, we moved in together and were roommates for the rest of our college years.

We still talk as animatedly as we did then. We still laugh as much, or more, and it is as if no time has passed from when we were having all those adventures with the music crowd in the Music Department of Adrian College from 72 to 76.

This time in Rocky Mountain National Park, I walked on high mountain trails created by the moccasined feet of American Indian women and children. The alpine tundra is so slow to heal that the trails these women made hundreds of years ago are still as wide and well-marked as the years when these women hiked across the mountaintops, following the changing seasons and the game they depended upon for life.

I could almost hear the women from so long ago, laughing and talking, the children running from side to side and exclaiming at each discovery.  I wish them well, those women, sending well-wishes back through time.  I hope each of them had a friend as giving and caring as the one I am with here in Rocky Mountain. I hope they each had a friend to laugh with and to journey with, as they crossed the Continental Divide, 12,000 feet above sea level, breath coming a little fast. Walking on, one foot in front of the other, peak after peak, tired and breathless.

This trip, Deb and I walked along the Colorado River, only ten miles from where it begins. Here in the Kawaneechee Valley, the mighty Colorado River starts out as an ordinary, braided stream, fresh and clear and unremarkable.

A river that gives life to so many.  Starting out so small.

Time like a river carried Deb and me forward from those four swift-passing years at Adrian College, so long ago. 

From that small beginning our lives have flowed on, expanding, rich, fruitful.

We found careers. Married good men. Gave children to the world.  Raised them. Love like a river flowed through us to them. Now our children are beginning to nurture the next generation, those who flow forward into life through them.

I think of our children and grandchildren, as Deb and I walk beside the small river that becomes the mighty Colorado. I wish for them all, the ones born and the ones not yet born, the great gift I have been given:  a close friend to journey the trail of life with.

May each of them, and may each of you who read this, be gifted with such a friend,  a friend who walks the high, hard trails of life beside you, a friend as constant as the earth, as life-giving as a river.