A Tale Of Two Authors

     Here's Jan and me back in college where Jan was my roomie,

...and bestie,

...when we two lived with six other girls in a house in the University of Dayton Student Ghetto, as the  neighborhood of student housing surrounding the UD campus was colloquially known in our day and I assume still is.

    Me, Jan, and our friend and fellow housemate Lynn going to a Fifties party.

     Whatever vibe causes people to hit it off and take an instant liking to each other must have been in the air the day Jan and I met at the beginning of our sophomore year. In retrospect, it couldn't have been that we bonded over shared interests, propensities or fields of study;  Jan was a neat, meticulously organized Secondary Education major while I was a French major with a flair for languages, procrastination and losing things.

     Jan was a vegetarian and an environmentalist before the word was in the vernacular;

...she was outdoorsy, a lover of nature, animals, and especially horses; in fact if there was one trait that defined Jan it was her love of horses. 
     I, on the other hand, was an aficionado of the  cultural arts, especially all things French,

...most especially the University of Dayton French Club, of which I was President.

    My idea of fun was spending a Saturday afternoon beneath the overhead light of a cubicle in the language lab practicing my French pronunciation or sitting in my dorm room practicing printing out the Cyrillic alphabet from my Russian textbook.
     But then good friends don’t generally give much thought to their differences, or, for that matter, to their similarities.
      Still, if back when we were college friends Jan and I could have looked into a crystal ball we’d no doubt have been astonished to learn of something we had in common that neither of us could have imagined at the time: that we were destined, someday far in the future, to have our first books published within a week of each other.
     But when we were twenty-one years old that shared event was decades away.

     In the meantime we graduated,

...and everything changed.

   I landed  jobs working for the United States Army in Babenhausen then Aschaffenburg, Germany,

...while Jan back in Ohio acquired a job as a teacher and her first horse, Geronimo.

      We kept in touch long distance for a few years, Jan even came to visit me in Germany with our friend Linda,

...during which time we spent a weekend in Paris.

      Then I returned to the States, married Tom, and moved to Louisville, Kentucky.  Jan still lived in Ohio. Later I moved back to Ohio and Jan moved to Louisville.
     Jan and I fell out of close touch and the years rolled on as did our lives in their respective directions until our only communication was a yearly Christmas card, if that.
      In truth I can't remember what made me think of Jan a few weeks ago. But I did, I guess the way you sometimes do, out of the blue and for no particular reason, think of someone you used to know, you wonder how they're doing, what they're up to, and you find yourself feeling like getting in touch.
      And so, to that end, thank goodness for Facebook.
      I looked up Jan, we friended, and I soon learned:

     That Jan, a retired science teacher, and her husband Jim, an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, now live in Indiana,

...where they take in and give much love to stray dogs,

...and kitties.

     I learned that Jan's love of horses is still central to her life,

...and I met Highlander, Jan's equine soul mate.

    I learned that Jan now has a jewelry-making business called Swishtails Custom Horsehair Jewelry,

...which involves horse owners bringing her strands of their horse's hair from which she braids jewelry, pieces commemorating and celebrating the special bond shared by horses and the people who love them.

      And I learned that, like me, Jan is a writer, her short pieces on the subject most close to her heart having appeared over the years in horse and trail-riding magazines such as The Trail Rider and Trail Blazer.
     And, like me, Jan expanded from writing stories for magazines to writing a book,

...which by a remarkable turn was released in the week following the release of my book.

     And so now, after so many years, Jan and I have reconnected. Stranger things, huh?

      "At Home On a Horse in the Woods: A Memoir” by my friend Janet Wolanin Alexander is a series of soulfully-written essays and prose poems that come together as a memoir/meditation on one woman’s love of and transcendent connection to all things equine. Jan opens her life and heart to the reader, sharing her personal struggles, longings, joys, and spiritual journey as well as her ever-widening discovery along the way of the beauty and wonder of God’s world through the beloved horses in her life.  Available at:
https://www.amazon.com//dp/194216630