Dear Nadinechen,

Remember our marathon conversions, those Saturdays in Kansas, when we’d start at one coffee shop, then move to a bookstore, then on to another coffee shop, and then a stop at Liberty Hall to pick up a few videos?  You’d bring over food – cheese, bread, nuts, dates, and little oranges that you’d unwrap like presents, all arranged on a plate resembling a still-life painting. You knew how to cozy up a room, an occasion, a conversation. And we could laugh. Remember when we were trying to clean the VHS player heads with a cotton ball taped to the end of a pencil and the cotton ball came off inside the VHS player? We laughed so long and hard we couldn’t see straight to watch the movies we’d picked up earlier in the day. And we’d talk and figure out our days and hearts and life and future.

You taught me so much – how to be a friend, how to be quiet sometimes, how to let the other person take the dance step, how to dress well, how to trust. You and dear wonderful Jens came to our wedding near Boston. You both saved the day, helping us set up, talking with everyone, smoothing the way. I always marveled how you talked with people, especially children – with style and grace and curiosity. And I remember on the morning of the big day, when I was teary-eyed, so scared about the jump I was about to make, I asked you: “Am I doing the right thing?”  And you replied: “Yay, I think so. You love each other, and I know you’ll figure out the rest.” I’ll never forget the calm that came over me hearing those words. That’s what you did, my sister-friend – you peered into darkness to find light.

So many memories crowd: our conversations about writing and words; your phone calls ending with – “I’ll stop by”; how you welcomed me to your life in Germany, inviting me to spend the holidays with your parents and with Annika. Remember, the three of us traveling to Stockholm over the New Year’s holiday ten years ago? What fun we had! And I remember, too, the afternoon I sobbed on Barry’s back step in Kansas when you were moving back to Germany. Oh, I didn’t want you to go.

We spent most of our friendship under the Kansas sky. This is my favorite paragraph by my favorite writer of the American plains, Willa Cather. The story takes place in the western prairies of Nebraska; the narrator, Jim Burden, is speaking:

“I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.  The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1918

I love you with all my heart, Nadinechen, my sister-friend. That’s where I’ll find you in memories and dreams until we meet again.

Natalie