THREE BY FIVE STORYTELLING PROJECT WITH JEN RICKARDS

My family moved from Danville, California to West Chester, Pennsylvania the summer before I began Sixth Grade at Unionville – Chadds Ford Middle School in Chester County, PA. During the first week of school that fall, I met Jennifer Rickards in Reading Class, where we shared a textbook while our class was reading Shakespeare aloud together. Jen and I quickly discovered that we were born days apart in the end of April, were both 11 years old, green-eyed and prone to shyness (then). We bonded over the infamous Shakespeare line: To be or not to be, that is the question that I ask of thee and we have remained friends ever since. Our friendship has allowed us to support and celebrate one another, while asking and answering many of life’s questions together for decades. We promised each other our senior year in high school that we’d go to our reunions together, and here we are at the last one we attended in 2016 at the Kennett Square Country Club.

I’m excited to now also support Jen’s amazing storytelling project, Three By Five.

When Jen first called me to talk about this project, which was only an idea that she was developing then, I told her I thought it was brilliant and that the snapshot stories of moments that altered people’s lives would be powerful when read both individually and as a compilation. The stories are obviously brief, but riveting and resonant, and the array of them speaks to the power of one moment to change us, just as my meeting Jen so many years ago changed my life for the better, for decades to come.

Join the lineup of stories by sharing anonymously a small moment that has altered the path of your life by recording it on a 3”x5” notecard and mail it to:
PO Box 308, ETNA, NH 03750

For more information and to read the anonymous Three By Five stories, visit: https://www.threebyfive.org

And join Three By Five on Facebook here.

All peace to each one of you. Dora