My large family was disorganized, loving, and literate. My parents were readers, thinkers, and music lovers. They were long on lively discourse and short on practical matters like fixing things, growing things, and sewing things.

When I first saw the mountains of the west, I fell in love. It was a feeling I had of western-ness, space, independence, and grandeur on a scale I had never experienced. It was a metaphor on a large scale for breaking the confines of home and youth.

MaryJane was my first great female friend in the west. I had moved west that fall to attend Utah State University in Logan, Utah. It was a locale that lent itself to explorations of nature and friendships. MaryJane represented everything I was not at that time. She was responsible. She was organized, efficient, and capable in ways I wasn’t. For example, she owned a car and could work on it when needed. She could make clothes. She probably had a budget, or something like that. She owned sets of towels and sheets! I was what you call a dreamer. I had traveled to Europe. I could do things like dance the frug, watusi, limbo, imitate a variety of foreign accents, know the words to Broadway show tunes, cook up piles of food, and make friends.

When MaryJane took me to meet her family, my experience became more personal. They welcomed me with open arms and an open refrigerator. MaryJane’s parents live in a tidy modest home with a small yard and large garden. In that tidy modest home and small yard, they produce piles of vegetables and fruit, they make their own bread, sew their clothes, knit sweaters and can their produce. They are, in every sense of the word, independent and practical. I loved them immediately. They made clothes while my family charged them at places like Lord and Taylor.

That first year in Utah, before I returned east for the summer, MaryJane left a gift on my door. She had pieced together different fabrics to form a yoke and sewed it on to some muslin. It had pockets and short sleeves. She had made a tunic top for me. I’ll always remember that gift and that gesture. At the time, I felt like I had nothing to offer in return. I couldn’t do now, what she did.

Now, I have a new understanding about the balance in friendships — that my wacky, worldly self could offer her pragmatic self an opportunity to see the world through a different lens. After almost thirty years, I’ve found our different fabrics form a beautiful friendship.