How extraordinary.

Last winter I received an email from Nancy, a friend I hadn’t talked with since I was nine:

I was researching Canadian women nature writers when I came upon your name. It is you, isn’t it? Peri is an unusual name.

How to explain very different lifetimes? How many pages of emails does it take to sketch in a life?

Because Nancy is a year younger than I am, we never shared a class. But almost every night I pedalled the short bike ride down the street because, behind her home was a generous, wild field where the neighborhood children our age and older converged after school. All those twilights, relieved from school’s tedium we roamed feral.

Mostly, the big kids devised elaborate games of Hide and Seek where the hunters showed no mercy to their usually younger prey. Scrunched down as I hid in the tall field grass, shaking with suspense, I spent many hours studying the assorted grasses and sedges and vines, fingering seeds, breaking open milkweed seed cases, quietly, quietly, barely breathing lest one of the predatory older boys crashing nearby should discover me in my lair.

But, as we put out feelers to connect with our long-ago selves, Nancy and I agreed that our most special hours together were spent when just the two of us girls were loitering by the shallow, sunlit, meandering creek which threaded the back of her property. Of course we caught tadpoles to raise in big glass pickle jars, and we made a corral for what we called water dancers (really water striders). We talked back to crows. Perhaps the most important thing, though, was just the time we spent together in a time apart where we could play. And as we messed around, without being at all aware of it, we were two girls being invited into the ecology of this enchanted place.

Eventually, schools, and that one-year differential of age separated us. With time, we both went on to our very different lives. And the paths of our lives have been remarkably different.

As a young woman, I used to dream of travelling to France. I knew it would happen. It was just a matter of time. Friday nights I played Judy Collins’

My father always promised us
That we would live in France
We’d go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance.

I just knew this would be me. I was sure of it.

I bought a slim book of 1950’s black and white Paris images. Post-war, they were raw and gritty. For some reason, I always turned to the steps of Montmartre.  That’s where I would go first.

Moving to Foley Mountain changed my path forever. In the early days of my family’s life there, it invited me into a kind of wildness I had never dreamed of in my girlhood, and I didn’t look back. I went ever deeper into loving the land close to home. While I still dreamed of travel, had imagined it as an important part of my life, this dream had not been feasible, so I had learned to journey inward.

Sharing my life at the park mattered deeply, and eventually I began writing first essays, and then books, mostly celebrating nature.

Nancy, on the other hand, had happened upon a more glamorous life. Nature mattered deeply to her too. (She and her friend Martha had gone for weekly bird-watching walks in what was then called the Rattray Marsh on Lake Ontario, had pored over Martha’s handsome collection of nature books. But after university she studied language in Paris, found work as a translator, married and also raised two sons, as did I. Living as she does in a Paris apartment, it is easy for her to explore widely. Travelling has remained a passion for her, and she tells of many adventures and explorations. Later in life, she discovered an affinity with photography, and now she pursues her interesting eye with like-minded friends.

When I heard that in May she would be coming to Ottawa to visit one of her two sons and his family, of course I wanted to invite this long-ago friend fellow nature-lover to come and see me and to see my life at Singing Meadow. We made a plan for me to meet her at the Smiths Falls train station.

I’m sending a picture, in case you don’t recognize me.

But really, we knew each other right away.

When she stepped off the train steps, it felt remarkably natural to hug and begin the conversation we had missed for seventy years.

First, I took her to see Foley Mountain, where my family and I had lived for 30 years while my late husband Barry was Supervisor and Teacher at the Conservation Area. Then, as soon as we had stowed her bag in my house, before the threatening rain we began a hasty walk –down into the Singing Meadow, a very different wetland from the one where we grew up. Talking all the way, we stood by the muskrat’s small pond, and clambered up the high hill, where we could see the long view.

As we walked, it felt natural to reminisce.

After dinner, we sat by a small fire and she told me about how most mornings she walked just a few blocks away to sit in a nearby café, about travel reuniting her family for a holiday in Iceland, (her pictures of this time were specially striking), about her life-changing time studying in Aix.

What makes our story special is that our lives took such different paths. We both held true to our love of nature, but…

Those were good years, said Nancy thoughtfully. We had a good childhood.

You must come and visit me in Paris, she urged.