Learning To Communicate or "Come Again?"

The 'family home' was the house where my great-grandparents lived. As far as I know, they moved in shortly after they married and stayed there throughout their 60+ years of married life. It hasn't been all that long since the house finally was sold to someone outside of the family.

Next door to the family home lived a widow. As long as I knew, the woman's family had lived in the house. She was from Croatia and didn't speak a word of English. My g-grandmother didn't speak a word of English. Yet, these two women would meet in the back yard and have 'conversations' over the fence almost every day. As a matter of fact, the neighbor woman was the only friend my g-grandmother had that was close to her own age--that I was aware of. While the two women came from different parts of the world and spoke different languages, they had more in common than differences. To look at them together, you could imagine they were related. Both were quite short and quite plump. They each wore floor-length dresses with bibbed aprons. Both had their hair in buns and wore babushkas at all times. Both women came here to America from their homelands and made new lives for themselves. They raised their families through good times and bad. They lived into old age and had fairly comfortable lives in the end. The biggest difference was the fact that my g-grandmother had her husband around into old age and the neighbor woman didn't. (I'm not sure when her husband died or what age he was when he did.) Somehow, the fact that these two COULDN'T speak the same language still allowed them to be friends for so many years--but the 'language' they COULD share was probably the biggest factor in their friendship. Sometimes SPEAKING gets us into more trouble than it is worth. :)