Seventeen years ago we travelled with our tent trailer across America to Washington DC, where we lived for four months while my husband Leo was a loaner reporter for USA Today. We spent a month getting there, visiting America's wonders and our friends along the way. One night we landed at a KOA in Rapid City, SD, at 2 a.m., after a vain search for a state park. We caught the pancake breakfast just before closing, late the next morning. As we wearily applied forks to pancakes, the elderly couple across the table beamed at us. "You must be turtles too," they said. We look at them with confusion. "We call ourselves the 'turtles' because we move pretty slowly." We laughed and agreed that we too, were turtles. We enjoyed a cheery breakfast with our new friends, Joe and Wilba Grotts, then packed up, toured Mt. Rushmore and pulled in at a campground near Wall Drug, in Wall, S.D. The Turtles were waiting. We were delighted to learn our paths headed in the same direction, so we spent the next two days traveling together, touring as far as Mitchell Corn Palace in Nebraska before they drove their RV home to St. Louis and we stopped in Centralia, Mo., to visit Leo's family.
Over the years we met up with Joe and Wilba. They even visited us here in Lynden. Wilba drew little turtles on the envelopes of her letters. About a year after Leo died of a heart attack in 2000, Joe passed on. Wilba said he started failing after he learned about Leo's death. Eventually Wilba's health declined and she was a shut-in at her home, where we visited several times. Last summer we camped at the same KOA where me met the turtles, and sent Wilba a postcard featuring a story about their famous pancake breakfasts.
Last week Leo Jr. and I spent Thanksgiving with my daughter Lainie, my in-laws and five brother-in-laws and their families. It was a wonderful reunion. On Friday we stopped by to visit Wilba on the way to the airport. We arrived the same day that hospice was to arrive. We spent a half hour with Wilba, remembering old times and holding hands. On Sunday her daughter called to tell me she had passed on, at age 90. Meanwhile the rest of us turtles keep plugging along, grateful for friends met along the way.
