When I was a little girl growing up in Chicago, my best friend was Linda Stutz. Linda belonged to a big family that lived in a big white house with a large wrap around porch and a yard of weeds that doubled as a jungle. I loved playing at her house of many bedrooms, a sun porch on the upper level and spaces in the attic where some of her brothers slept. It seemed there were no no-play zones. When Linda and I played together, we would take old drapes and hang them all over her bedroom creating neat crawl through spaces. She had a box of old dresses and hats that we donned in our pretending. Sometimes we played school, which I never see children play nowadays, and we created chaos with papers and books and crayons. There was always a mess when we were done. I suppose her mother made us clean up after we played, though I don’t really remember that part.
My grandchildren are over today. They have a friend from their neighborhood with them. They have been playing in the basement most of the day and I just went down to see how they were doing. That is when I thought about Linda Stutz.
No. She moved away from the neighborhood by the time we got to high school age. But with facebook and all, you never know.
The way you titled your post I thought she had died. Are you still in touch with her?