Good-Bye, Dear Friend

     Yesterday my friend Jan Wolanin Alexander died.
​      Jan and I met in college where we were roomies,

...and besties.

...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 Biology Secondary Education major from Cleveland while I was a French major from Philadelphia 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 indoorsy aficionado of the cultural arts, especially all things French, most especially the University of Dayton French Club, of which I was President. 

​     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, and that over the next few years we'd both go on to write more books.
     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 got a job as a science 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 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.
         But then seven years ago out of the blue and for no particular reason I can say, I found myself thinking of Jan, wondering how she was doing, what she was up to, and I suddenly felt like getting in touch. 
       And to this end, thank goodness for Facebook, by which means I found Jan, friended her, and we reconnected as easily as if all those decades had never come between us.
         Jan, a retired science teacher, and her husband Jim, a retired Associate Professor of Biology from the University of Louisville, lived in Indiana,

...where they took in and gave much love to stray dogs,

...and kitties.

       But central to Jan's life was her love of horses. Horses were her spirit animals and her bliss, especially her equine soulmate, Highlander.

        And horses were her source of inspiration and creativity. Jan had a jewelry-making business called Swishtails Custom Horsehair Jewelry,

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

​       And that subject which was most dear to her heart was likewise her inspiration for her writing, first short pieces that were published over the years in horse and trail-riding magazines such as The Trail Rider and Trail Blazer, then in her books.

       Her first book, At Home on a Horse in the Woods, is a series of beautifully-written essays and prose poems that come together as a memoir/meditation in which Jan opened her life and heart, 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.

     
​     Her next book, “Braiding Horsehair Bracelets: Your Beginner’s Guide” is an enlightening and charming step-by-step introduction to the art of crafting  bracelets from horse tail hair worked into braids.

     
​      Jan's final work, published last year, is a children's book called "Finally...Horses!" that brings young readers into the imaginative world that they'll recognize as their own and then continues the story of how horses came into her life.

     Though our subject matter and writing styles have been as different as all the other differences that somehow brought us together - I write romantic comedy, Jan wrote equine non-fiction - our books served as yet another bond between Jan and me. Jan helped me with my writing and I helped her with hers, we discussed each other's issues, critiqued and proof-read each other's manuscripts, even helped each other a bit with marketing. 

     I dearly loved and often used for advertising this photo Jan sent me of her reading one of my books.

      Here's a bookmark Jan made me for helping her line up a podcast gig.

       I last saw Jan about a year ago when she was passing through Columbus. But we'd call from time to time and, again, thanks to Facebook, it felt as if we were in daily communication, me with her through her almost daily posts on horse care and trail riding, her with me through my blogs. We often communicated via Facebook personal messaging. 
       Last Friday I received a phone call from Jan's brother telling me that Jan had been thrown from her horse the previous Sunday during a ride with a friend. Another horse ahead of them on the trail had somehow become spooked, thrown its rider, turned around and went galloping until it crashed into Jan's horse. Her horse was so traumatized that even Jan, an expert horsewoman, could not control him and he threw her with such force that the helmet and protective vest she was wearing could not prevent the broken bones and head injury she suffered.
     Jan survived a few days then yesterday, Monday, she crossed over the rainbow bridge. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head and my heart around the fact that Jan, who was so healthy and active, so alive and present in my life, is suddenly gone.
      Yesterday I returned to her Facebook page. In a reply to a comment from a friend, here is the last sentence she wrote on Facebook, or in fact, anywhere:

        And here was my reply to her reply:

       Rest in peace, my dear friend.