My Friend Norma
by Patti Landes Adams, Editor

Soon after our first child was born, my husband and I decided that he should return to school. This meant selling our home and moving to another state. The town where the university was located was familiar enough. We had lived there as students during our courtship and engagement. Going back as a married couple was different however. All of our old friends had graduated or moved away. The old hangouts didn't have the same appeal now that we were a fami1y. Being a married student seemed like belonging to an entirely different culture. I was lonely at home with our baby daughter a1l day and I longed for adult conversation. We tried living in an apartment, but the party noise became annoying so we began to search for a place we could really call home, with a yard and trees where our daughter could play.

One day my husband came home after c1ass and told me he had found the perfect house. It was quite an old home with a huge yard. It was only a block from campus and had tons of raspberry bushes growing in the back yard.

He said the really neat thing about it was the pioneer wagon train embossed in the bricks over the fireplace. That sounded about as homey as we could ever get. When I saw the house, I fell in love with it, too. We told the owners we'd take it. They made us wait five days until they decided we were the right ones to rent it.

We moved in as soon as we could and suddenly I was no longer lonely, thanks to Carl and Norma. They were our next-door neighbors and immediately became our dearest friends. They weren't students at the university like we were. In fact, when they moved into the neighborhood, the university was only an academy.

Our children weren't the same age. Their son was a grandfather and my daughter would often play with Norma's great-grandchildren. Yet when Norma would see me returning from the grocery store or from work, she would always invite me to sit on her porch swing and we would talk for hours, as if we had known each other forever. We talked about babies and the challenges that come with raising them. We talked about giving birth and how, in her day, she was put in a twilight sleep during childbirth. I told her about epidurals and being awake when the baby came. She spent nearly two weeks in the hospital and l spent only a day. We talked about men and how husbands can get sometimes and that we just love them anyway. Norma knew what she was talking about. She and Carl had been married for nearly seventy years. I admired the friendship they seemed to have and hoped that after that many years, my husband and I would have that same love.

I never thought of them as being older than we were. I was often reminded of it though when I would go into Norma's kitchen to visit. As I walked past her basement door, there was a large sign hanging there. It was made for Carl's birthday one year, by one of his grandchildren, and read: "From 1900 to '85, we can't believe you're still alive!" I couldn't believe he was that old! He worked circles around me out in the garden and never acted like he was in a hurry. And he still had time to go fishing with his brother.

Next door to their home they had built student apartments - aptly named Norma's. During our visits to their kitchen we were often introduced to the female residents who were paying rent or conducting some other business with Norma. 

On the Fourth of July we sat out on their porch and made the best homemade raspberry ice cream I have ever tasted. It had been one of the hottest days on record and so when the city's overloaded power system failed, we unplugged the electric ice-cream maker and Carl and my husband cranked the rest by hand. We then sat back and enjoyed the ice cream, the fireworks, and each other's company. Their porch became my favorite place 10 be.

They were like grandparents to our daughter, Jessica. She called Carl "Grandpa" and I would often find that she had sneaked away from our house to go over to their back door. They always had her favorite cookie in the cupboard and gave her a package of them all to herself, for her first birthday.

We enjoyed taking them to our favorite Italian restaurant or having them over to our home for dinner. They would often have us over for breakfast or supper and then we'd go outside and sit on the porch for a while.

After a year we moved away. I hated to leave. Carl and Norma were the best thing about being there.

Norma and I kept in touch but we weren't able to see them for a few years because we lived so far away. We later moved within traveling distance  and were excited to be able to see them again. Early that fall Carl had a stroke and passed away a few days later. He was nearly ninety-three years old. We loved and missed him very much.

Foe years, the highlight of my trip "into town" was stopping by to see Norma. When the weather was good we visited on the porch, caught up on news, and reminisced about Carl. When is was snowy we visited in her warm kitchen. One day I received a call from her daughter that Norma had passed away. Losing Norma was like losing my best friend in Junior High School. My children lost a "grandmother."

Thank you, Norma, for being my friend.

P.S. A couple of years ago my daughter enrolled in the same university. She searched all over town for a great place to live - but finally decided she wanted to live at Norma's. She was a bit of a celebrity for a time - having actually known Norma. The other coeds enjoyed hearing stories about the woman for whom their apartment complex was named.