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Sunny Side Up with Kathleen Gibson Friends are in our lives for a reason or a season I am rich in my friends, I�ve always said. Claire* made me extremely wealthy. Claire wasn�t a typical woman. She�d learned to ride horseback at two and had since spent her life around horses, cows and cowboys on the Canadian prairie. She rode the range, fixed fences and did about everything I didn�t. �I�m building a barn at home,� she told me one day, over a cup of tea. I loved visiting her country home. The place, well hidden and far from city life, fueled my imagination of heaven. �Have you ever built a barn before?� I asked. �No,� she said. �How hard could it be?� �Sorry, Claire, you can�t have that job. You don�t have the right training.� I worry when my girlfriends act like superheroes. Too late. She�d already finished all the stalls but one on one side, a job that included mixing and pouring cement, tossing two by sixes around like so many pencils, and hauling 200 pound railway ties from several hundred feet away�then placing them in the trench she�d already dug in the barn. And all without aid of man, tractor or wagon. I shouldn�t have been surprised. Earlier that year she�d added a mud room onto one end of her house. And the previous year, while on a big-game reconnaissance trip up North, she�d single-handedly built a hunter�s shelter. (She also stared down a grizzly and rescued a packhorse train off a crevice in a glacier, but that�s another story.) When I turned fifty, Claire�already a grandmother�gave me several pages of scrawled quotes and messages�funny, practical and wise; lessons she�d learned about aging and grandparenting. As a new grandmother, I accepted those words gladly. I still treasure them. I loved Claire�s spirit, a combination of indomitable pluck, irrepressible cheer, take-charge competence and genuine teachability. I loved it mostly because when I knew her best, it resonated with the strength and wisdom of her Christian faith and genuine love for others. She�d grown in that faith through circumstances desperate and divine�most more desperate than divine. Of all the gifts I value from my friends it�s the gift of themselves I cherish most. When that �self� is wrapped in the character of Jesus Christ it inspires me to follow him better too�and that�s a gift beyond gifts. Claire completed that barn, I�m sure. Doubtless it became the perfect home for her family�s menagerie; six or seven horses, a lama and a clutch of �chicken allsorts� as I called them. Perhaps even a sheep or two. Friends, as someone once said, are in our lives for either a season or a reason. Unfortunate circumstances have moved Claire�s life and mine along different paths for now, but I�ll never forget her, or the miracle that, for a time, she invited me in, and I saw a new reflection of Christ. Old cowgirl�thanks. *name changed July 16, 2008 �2008, Kathleen Gibson Respond Home |
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