Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2007.

People loved our story.

Rowland and I had been friends when we were very young teenagers, eons ago, in a vacation village on the coast of Maine.

We walked on the surf rocks and swam at the beach and met every day on the wharf when the mail boat came in.

Back then, I had a wild crush on him, the kind one has at age 14; I think he liked my brother more than he liked me.

When my family drove away from the little town at the end of that summer, heading for a new home in California, I wept in the back seat of our car, thinking I’d never see Rowland again.

One never knows, does one?

Last year — through mutual friends in Carmel — we met again after more than 60 years.

He was a widower after a 50-year marriage; I had been through two husbands and dozens of crushes and a serious romance or two.

We met for lunch at Boca a couple of times, and on the deck at Servino Ristorante in Tiburon, and for a ferry trip to the city from Larkspur. We were immediately compatible, with lots of catching up to do and memories coming out our ears.

At one point, he suggested we travel together; initially I was reluctant, as he is a rock-ribbed Republican and I thought, “I’d probably kill you by the end of the first day.”

But when he suggested we go back to Maine — to the little village called Five Islands, where we had known each other for three summers — I had to say yes.

We went — and we survived.

I, at least, had a wonderful time.

We began with a week in Newfoundland, where we explored the eastern part of the island by car, acquainting ourselves with a rugged seaside culture and learning about the people we had become.

We flew to Nova Scotia, then took a ferry from Yarmouth to Portland, Maine.

A woman in a Yarmouth restaurant said, “I knew you two weren’t married; you were talking too much.”

True: we rarely stopped talking. We each had 60 years of stories that the other hadn’t heard, and punchlines we loved to deliver. It took almost two weeks before we began to repeat ourselves, and when we did, we both started laughing. When one of us got long-winded we teased the other with, “And your point is?”

Being back in Five Islands was especially poignant. When we were young, our families each owned a summer cottage. (There weren’t many cottages in the whole town.) Back then, the 12-mile road from Bath was unpaved; the town had no electricity; we used outhouses and kerosene lamps and carted water from a pump at the end of the lane.

Our memories were both joyous and painful. It was so long ago. So many people had died.

The miracle was that the town is the same. A few old buildings are gone — the ice cream parlor, the general store — but nothing new has been built. We ate lobsters on the wharf, we watched the lobstermen load and unload their boats.

One day we took a rented boat to Boothbay. Rowland knew every inlet and lighthouse. He had been a sailor when young.

I hadn’t known that, of course. During our trip, I learned that he had always been a brainiac, with lots of talents and interests. When I was 14, all I saw were dimples and brown curly hair.

At the B&B where we stayed, on the wharf at Five Islands, in the restaurant where ate several times, people pumped us for our story, and we smiled a lot, telling it. We posed for lots of pictures.

We were both rather wistful, driving from Five Islands to Portland to catch the plane home.

He is back at his apartment in Santa Rosa now; I am swept up in my crazy life in Marin — movies and dinners and houseguests and a college reunion a Stanford.

But I know we will see each other again.

It probably won’t take 60 years.