Mud stew, a piece of candy and a pen pal

"If I could I would send a sticker or piece of candy with this!"

That is the closing line from an e-mail dated November 19, 2003. It came to me from Jaime Ploof, the first person I ever knew as a friend. And, even today, it makes me laugh.

Our parents were friends when we were growing up in Nebraska, where I was born. Jaime and I would play for hours while our moms sat at the kitchen table and talked about whatever adults talked about in 1982. Probably missing Elvis.

At that age, fun was found making stew by digging a hole in the front yard, filling it with water and mixing in carrots with a stick. I wonder now if we had permission to use what likely were perfectly good carrots in the stew we certainly weren't going to eat.

When Jaime was old enough to go to school, I would hide behind the giant propane tank in the yard and try to scare her when she got off the bus. That also was around the time she was the flower girl and I was the ring bearer in the wedding of my Aunt Kim and Uncle Randy.

My family then moved to Kansas. But so did Jaime and her family. Only, instead of living in a tiny community in Southeast Nebraska, we were now growing up 50 miles apart in different towns in Southwest Kansas.

That distance seemed like a million miles to me at age 6. My visits with Jaime were less frequent.

Every Christmas, I knew I could count on seeing her. It became a tradition that her family would drive to Minneola from Garden City for Christmas dinner. We would play all afternoon with the toys we each had gotten from Santa. I have fondest memories from the year Jaime got the game Simon. I think we wore out two sets of batteries pushing blue, yellow, green. Blue, yellow, green, yellow. And so on.

Those holiday visits, for whatever reason, stopped being annual by the time I was a freshman and she was a sophomore in high school. Still, when it came time to ask someone to my junior prom, I turned to Jaime. I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, but we picked right up where our pen pal letters had left off.

And that's where the sticker or piece of candy comment comes into the picture. Even though Jaime and I weren't seeing each other as often throughout much of our elementary school years, we were avid pen pals. I would send off a letter to Garden City and include a packet of Smarties. She would send a reply with a scratch-and-sniff grape sticker or something else for my collection.

Our silly childhood memories will forever be a part of my life. And they'll always make me smile and remember why it's so sweet to be a kid. I sometimes long for the simple days of making a mud stew with Jaime.

The last time I saw my earliest childhood friend was in November at my mom's funeral. It was refreshing to see her there, as she always puts a smile on my face. And, even though I live a lot more than 50 miles from a grown-up Jaime, I still can't wait until the next time I see her.