Senior Ashley Obrey reflects on growing up and growing apart from her childhood friend and the memories that will remain with her forever.
Ashley Obrey
Staff Writer
Photo Courtesy Ashley Obrey
Ashley Obrey, left, and her childhood friend Cobey visit after spending four years away at college.
“Twenty dollars and forty-three cents,” the cashier announces, smiling.
“Hey, Cobes, ya got 43 cents?” I ask, brushing my bangs out of my beach-tanned face. The smell of money is fresh on my hands.
I turn to see Cobey tearing into our new package of watermelon Bubblicious before she opens her Velcro wallet to come up with the rest of the cash.
“Lemme check,” she says.
Ashley Obrey, left, and her childhood friend Cobey Ackerman.
Cobey hands two quarters to the cashier, simultaneously blowing a big bubble in her chewy goodness.
“Did ya see that?” she asks incredulously, bubble remnants stuck to her freckled cheeks.
The dust-coated, asphalt-smelling construction worker behind us laughs at Cobey’s expression as she tosses me the gum package, a last minute addition to our purchases at Ace Hardware in Kainaliu, Hawaii.
Excited, I rip open the wrapper on my piece.
Bubble gum was the only thing we’d blow our cash on, save for the occasional shrimp burger from Sandy’s down the road. For these two “Classic Cowgirls,” the $20 our parents gave us was better spent on what we called “fort stuff,” which included the burlap bags, nails and paint we just purchased for our little home away from home.
Life was much simpler back when Cobey and I were 10. Our carefree days were spent running around Cobey’s ranch searching for something we could call our own. In second grade, it was pillow forts, and in fourth grade, while camping, we found solace in a grove of kiawe trees enclosing a little room with natural lava flooring. But fifth grade found us the ultimate hideaway right on the familiar grounds of the Ackerman ranch.
Our fort was an old dairy constructed of rotting wood, rusty aluminum panels and concrete floors. It doesn’t sound like much to the common folk, but to Cobey and me and our drifting imaginations, it was much more than that; this was our mansion on a fancy estate where we spent time leisurely nibbling tropical fruit and living the high life of famous movie stars with diamonds and horses. This was no broken-down shack; to us, it was a little piece of heaven.
We spent many an hour of our childhood weekends cleaning the suffocating grass and weeds out of the room, painting the wood, hammering nails and hanging up pictures (old, with cracked glass), covering the windows with pretty curtains (burlap), and designing a cool “Classic Cowgirls” logo that showed strong resemblance to the Coca-Cola logo of the time (it’s no coincidence that Coke was our favorite soda back then) below our beloved “picture window.”
Looking out, we enjoyed what a realtor would deem a “prime view”: a vast expanse of Cobey’s ranch smiled at us in our make-believe mansion. From our perch we could see cows, horses, monkeypod trees, and the deep blue Pacific that waited for us at the bottom of the several-mile hike. Though we’d trek down there at times, our time was better spent adding to our valuable gum collection, which included every flavor of gum Oshima Store sold, located on the main ceiling beam; sweeping dirt off the impossible-to-clean floor; dreaming about our future husbands; eating “gourmet” liliko’i and mango on the over-sized spool-table, juices streaming down our arms; and hiding from boys — namely Dodge, Cobey’s brother — who would make it his favorite pastime to tease our Classic Cowgirls cheer and rearrange things in our fort heaven.
It was a place of dreams and songs, love and happiness, sweet smells and good friends, magic and childhood. Anything could happen here … it was our time, our imaginations, our innocent dreams of what was to come.
But then we grew up.
Ten years (four semesters of college, several broken hearts and a panoply of experiences) later, we came back to find that our once-prolific flower pots contained nothing but the remnants of dead flowers and old dirt. The smell of musty wood competed with the odor of dead grass that had overgrown our fort and broken in through our burlap curtains. Our garage sale finds lay on the floor, our rattan chairs sat broken, and vine grass created a carpet on the cement floor of the, well, the old dairy. Because that’s what it really was.
For Cobey and me, who stood laughing at our “No Trespassing” sign that was obviously ignored by the rascal sons of the cowboys who maintain the ranch, the wonder of having our own place was gone. Our lives, our big dreams were no longer the same; it felt like the day I understood that Santa Claus lived merely in my heart and not at the North Pole. The old excitement of having this place was replaced by the simple and subtle thrill of the memory of our happiness here.
We sat reminiscing about the old days and recounting stories of the two of us and Dodge, who had recently, at 22, fallen victim to cancer.
Our half hour, though, seems longer than the days spent in our childhood wonderland, as the value of time has changed since we were 10.
Time to leave, we chanted the traditional Classic Cowgirls song for old times’s sake, tearfully embraced, and headed out the gate, fighting the jungle of grass through the barbed wire fence.
Seated in the car, prepared to leave, I snapped my Bubblicious bubble and waved at Cobey’s Bronco heading down the ranch.
Smiling at the ability to see old wonders with new eyes, I then realized that there comes a time when our childhood dies, and we must be born into our new life.
Both of us, each on our separate track, have accepted this truth.
09-23-2004
