New Girl in the Neighborhood

After about 3 years, the neighbors I told you about in my last post moved away. Neighbors with “children” didn’t move into that place until I was in 8th Grade. They had a girl, one year younger than me. I was so happy then to have a girl friend that lived close by. We became very close; we spent a lot of time at each others houses. My Mother never minded my friendship with her, maybe because I was older by then. Her name was Dottie and she had come from the “city”, we thought in those days, the “big city”, but it was actually only the small town of Hanover, (but it was still bigger than our nearby East Berlin!). The school in Hanover was very much larger than our school and this was a real adjustment for Dottie. I also found out from her that in their school what “clothes” you wore, meant a lot. It was then, in Hanover, like it is at most schools today. Our little rural high school did not buy into these thoughts, I think because we were all from rural area and farms, and none of our parents had money, nor would allow such thinking! There were only about 4 girls in our class that dressed with the up to date fashions, and the rest of us didn’t let them intimate
us “too much”, we just figured that their parents “had money”. We accepted that our parents did not have money, and we didn’t press them for material things, like the kids of today do. We parents of today have allowed our children to press us. I’m sure it’s because we want to give our children what we didn’t have. I don’t know though, that we have done them any favors, by allowing them to fall into the materialist world of today.

In those days, girls were not really allowed to talk on the telephone in the evenings to their girl friends from school. Our parents would not drive us back and forth to each other’s houses, so your friends you had in school, you only saw them during school. Maybe once during the school year, if you were lucky, you could talk your Mother into letting a school friend come home from school with you on the bus and stay overnight.
That was always fun, but it didn’t happen often. Again, this is probably why, when we had children, we made sure they could get together with their friends away from school, we drove them around town and let them have their sleepovers!

You can see why it was especially good to have Dottie down the road. We could walk to each others houses and spend time together. We rode school bus together, went to school dances, took long walks at the farm and talked teenage girl talk. It was good to have a confidant. Many times, Dottie would lend me something from her closet for me to wear to the school dances. I always appreciated that, as I felt her wardrobe was so much better than mine! Dottie taught me a lot about clothing, make up, hair and all the teen stuff!

Mom appreciated Dottie’s Mother being able to drive one way to the school, so she didn’t have to drive us both ways to the school for dances, etc. Our high school was a good 8 -10 miles from our farm. Mom willingly let me get my driver’s license when I was 16, so she wouldn’t have to, as she put it “haul me” to school events.

Dottie and I remained close friends through our junior and senior years. She married a local boy, they were high school sweethearts, and stayed in the area. Dottie and I still get together when I get home and we reminisce about our high school years and the fun and friendship we had.