It’s a Different Kind of Love in Life-Long Friendship

I went to four different elementary schools, moved from Washington DC to Denver, then to Los Angeles, and then back to Colorado in Colorado Springs just before starting junior high. My closest friends were always my siblings because we moved so much in those early days.

But in 2nd grade, I met Amorisa Lynn at Devonshire Elementary School in Chatsworth, CA. We were best friends immediately because we had SO much in common. We were both tiny, and had long, very straight, very fine brown hair. And in 2nd grade, that’s all it takes.

I remember when a boy who liked her broke her pinky finger. Again, 2nd grade.

And I remember going to her home after school and for sleepovers. Her Taiwanese grandmother lived with them, and would fix us snacks and Ramen noodles - and wouldn’t let me use a fork or spoon - so I learned to use chopsticks like a natural.

Aimee, Sarah, Gwenda (Aimee’s little sister) - 1978, Chatsworth, California

Amorisa moved around even more often than I did, so our long-term friendship seems even more unlikely.

Aimee remembers lots of things I had forgotten, like the fact that I taught her how to flip an egg in a skillet, and how to make “Super Eggies”, which are typically known as egg-in-a-nest.

The strange part about our long friendship is that we only lived in the same place for a very brief amount of time. After 2nd grade I switched schools, then she moved away from our neighborhood. She finally got back to our neighborhood at the beginning of 6th grade and started school at the same school I attended, but then I moved, two weeks into the school year, to Colorado Springs.

We kept in touch all those years the old fashioned way - as Pen Pals. Yes, we wrote letters to each other throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. We visited each other a few times, traveling across the country by ourselves and living as part of each other’s families for a few weeks at a time during the summer.

Here we are, nearly 43 years later, spending a weekend together in Cayucos, California, where my husband and I decided to rent a beach house for a month to work remotely in a place where we didn’t have to shovel snow.

Panorama fun in Cayucos, CA February 2020

I took the opportunity to record this episode of Your Stories Don’t Define You with Aimee, all about friendship, our friendship, and the idea of friendship itself, while we were together. This is the first time in at least 20 years that we’ve had time to spend together like this, and we took full advantage of every moment. And just like any other true friendship, we picked up right where we left off, never skipping a beat, like no time had passed between visits. The only evidence being a few gray hairs and images of grown children.

Amorisa Lynn Denzel is a freelance artist living in Ventura, California.

Photo of a painting by Amorisa Lynn Denzel