F is for Frances

Frances was my very first friend.  I was just a baby when we met so I don't know much about that.  The times I remember were somewhere around the age of three or four. 

Frances lived across the street. There were two huge pine trees in the front yard of her house.  Well, at least they were huge to 3-year-old me.  We loved to climb up on the lower branches and enjoy the shade provided by the aromatic branches.

If we weren't in the trees out front we were running around the rows of grapevines in the back yard.  I'm pretty sure they were Concord grapes- not that I knew that then, but what I recall of their coloring and shape makes me believe it to be true.

Frances and I would push our baby strollers up and down Hollen Ave.- resembling the very same thing our mothers had done just a few years before.

My younger sister, Jeen, was named after Frances' mother.  Mrs. Hendricks spelled her name irregularly-with two ee's- and so does my sister.  I'm not sure where the spelling came from but the legend goes that it just made it easier to remember how to spell when it was time to learn about that.

By the time I was five my family moved from the neighborhood- south on 95- far away from our Baltimore home.  We returned to the area a year later but lived a ways away from Frances.  Perhaps I saw her again if our parents visited but I don't remember too much about any of that.

But, 53 years later I still remember Frances.

Life Lesson:  First friends are always with you.