Friends Are Forever

Me, Mel and Ed at Ray and RosemaryMartin's log home

This morning three of us who were college roommates at Eastern Mennonite University (then EMC) 53 years ago got together with our wives for our annual breakfast reunion on the first Saturday of December. This year we met at the home of Old Order Mennonite hosts Ray and Rosemary Martin in their lovely log home in the wooded foothills ten miles west of Dayton.

Mel and I were Augusta County neighbors and good friends even before college. He and his wife Dorothy live near Fort Defiance and are enjoying their retirement from the medical practice that kept Mel more than busy for decades. They now enjoy traveling and being with grandchildren and Mel is an accomplished wood worker.

Ed, a second cousin from Kansas, later married Clara, his sweetheart from Iowa, and they now live in Harrisonburg. Ed has been an active pastor and served several churches before their semi-retirement a number of years ago. He is also a skilled carpenter and craftsman and is currently active as a volunteer at the Brethren-Mennonite Heritage Center. One of his latest spare time projects is making a set of kitchen cabinets for their daughter.

These are great people, and whenever we get together it is as if we had never been apart. And this morning Mel's wife, who was Dorothy Martin, learned that she was a double second cousin to Ray, our host. Both grew up in the same community in Indiana but were members of different churches and to their knowledge had never met.

Small world, and with so many great ties that bind.