I first met Lisa when I was 12. I had just moved to rural Iowa from California, and she was from a nearby school district that had recently merged with mine. We weren’t close at first, but I liked her immediately because Lisa was one of a few girls who seemed actually proud to be different, a rarity in middle school life.
Our first year of high school I moved to the nearby town where Lisa lived, and it changed my life. I don’t even remember how we became inseparable, but I just know that our quirky behavior and love of music soon made us constant presences in each other's daily lives and parents’ homes. We obsessed over John Cusack, had a shared vocabulary and countless inside jokes, and made more mix tapes than I can ever begin to quantify.
For those of you who missed out on the phenomenon, mix tapes were our playlists in the 80’s and early 90’s. The big difference is unlike playlists found on streaming digital music services, an analog mix tape had a finite amount of space dictated by the length of a tape wrapped around two spools inside a plastic case. At most, you got 90 minutes per tape, or 45 minutes per side, to record everything you wanted to say with songs. Making a great mix tape was truly an art form. Lisa and I spent hours, days, WEEKS painstakingly building little musical diaries, love letters, and time capsules. As far as hobbies go, in our high school days, the crafting of mix tapes was numero uno, and as far as friendships go, you couldn’t get much closer than Lisa and me at that time. We remained inseparable through high school, and into our first year of college, but as life took us in different directions we eventually lost contact with each other. For 20 years we didn’t really speak.
Fast forward to the present. In a weird twist of fate decades in the making, Lisa and I came back into each other's lives in a big way in 2019. I started a job at our local chamber of commerce, and right across the street, Lisa opened a fitness studio. After a bumpy couple of COVID years, Lisa now has opened two successful healthy beverage shops in our county, one of which is located one block from my recently-opened art gallery and creative space. It turns out that although life has changed us some, we still have the shared threads that made our friendship what it was in high school–plus, a new one in small business ownership, which neither of us would have ever predicted. These days, we both still love and obsess over music. We still wear our weirdness as badges of honor. Many of the inside jokes and made up words from back then enter into our daily conversations now. As an added bonus, we both turned out to be homebodies, so nobody is offended if we don’t get together outside of popping into each other’s businesses and sending voice messages via text (because we both detest talking on the phone). We’re fixtures in each other’s lives again, but now as adults working on ways to grow our businesses by partnering on events…and maybe even doing a podcast centered on our shared love of music.
I’ve said it before, but had I not moved to rural Iowa as a kid or moved back here as an adult, there is no way I would be who or what I am today. Of all the reasons I’m so grateful for this idyllic life, this friendship is near the top of the list. And beyond its responsibility for forming a huge part of my personality as it is now, I just love that while so much changes over the course of a lifetime, some friendships have the ability to also change, and maybe even pause, but never stop.
Sara Middleton is a correspondent and columnist for Mid-America Publishing and resident artist/owner of Studio Sol Gallery & Creative Space in Eagle Grove, Iowa. Email her at sara.studiosol@gmail.com or find her at http://studiosolllc.com
