April 9 is my childhood friend’s birthday. The date is like a holiday in my mind.

How long we’ve been friends? I don’t know. We lived in farm country. We probably went to the Sanford Methodist Church Sunday school together before we started first grade in the Sanford country school. Neither building exists today. Now we live hundreds of miles from one another with but a few annual contacts.

Yesterday I called to wish her “Happy Birthday.” We laughed about the stuff we did as kids.

She remembered the float we’d built on my dad’s pickup truck. We were 4-H members with my mother as our leader. We couldn’t remember what we did although she thought it had to do with cream cheese and sandwiches. This morning my 4-H Achievement book, I’ve kept from those years, yielded pictures of us in white uniforms and caps.

Somehow it must have demonstrated the 1946 Labor Day Parade theme Food for Europe. Our float placed third.

The pictures were taken in front of my house. The float was done totally in green and white.