Amery is a dinky little town in the far north of Wisconsin. It’s a town of fewer than 3,000 people where pretty much everyone knows everyone else. I spent my formative years there and always consider it to be my home town. I feel very much aligned with life in northern Wisconsin yet life’s twists and turns led me to live in South Australia.

If you took a globe and stuck a pin in Amery and tied a string to it and tried to find the furthest habitable place on Earth from Amery you would no doubt find the Adelaide Hills, where I currently live. It would be hard to find a place further from home. So it’s quite amazing to find someone from Amery living so far, far away from home.

Even more amazing to find two people from Amery whose life’s journeys have brought them to live within 20 kilometres of each other in the Adelaide Hills.

I don’t recall knowing Lorrie Korsbon while I was in high school. She started high school just after I graduated. But in Amery, you always know the family, so I knew the Korsbon family well. Her sister, Debbie, was a couple of years older than me and was the editor of the school newspaper when I signed up to be a cub reporter. Likewise, Lorrie didn’t know me but she knew my sister, Jenni, who was a couple of years older than her. And as it turns out our mothers knew each other.

Around 18 years ago, word got out in Amery that mom was coming to visit us in Australia. Lorrie’s mom told my mom that Lorrie was also living in Australia and although their geography of Australia was limited they thought we might live near each other. When mom arrived she gave me Lorrie’s number and I called her only to learn that she and her family were living quite near us. Lorrie popped in the next day or so to pay us a quick visit. We learned that she had left Amery to work for the American multinational IT company, EDS. In 1990, she took up an offer by EDS to work in their Australia office. It didn’t take long before she met her husband, Paul Beattie, and later their jobs brought them to South Australia where they settled in the Adelaide Hills. I was thrilled about having someone from my home town just 20 minutes away so we promised to get together again. At the time either us or Lorrie was about to travel or do something so we only had a brief get together with promises to get together later.

But then life seemed to have gotten in the way. Or perhaps babies. Lorrie had one daughter at the time, Aislenn, with another, Abigail, on the way. And Joseph was born two days after Abigail. I kept intending to get back in touch with Lorrie but never had a chance and after a while you reach the point of no return where it’s too embarrassing to finally call. And I just assumed Lorrie led an itinerant lifestyle like me and had long ago moved somewhere else.

Fast forward about 9-10 years and I am at the playground of St Michael’s Primary School in Hahndorf and coaching softball. As I’m barking out calls in my American accent to my kids, I see a woman with two children stopping to watch me. Her children are pulling at her, ‘C’mon mom, let’s go’. But the woman remained watching me. I needed recruits for the softball team and so I was thinking how great it would be if this woman wanted to enrol her girls on the team. But she wasn’t thinking about softball and instead her eyes were glued to a bright red sweatshirt I wore with the word ‘WISCONSIN’ across the chest. Finally, despite having the girls pulling at her, she approached me. ‘Are you from Wisconsin?,’ she asked. ‘Indeed, I am,’ I said. ‘Where abouts?’. I told her it was way up north. No one has heard of it. It’s in Polk County. ‘Where abouts in Polk County?’ she asked. ‘A little town called Amery,’ I said. I could immediately see the shock on her face and immediately we both came to the conclusion of who we were talking to. We had both completely forgotten about each other and both assumed the other had moved on. We exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together.

But then life got in the way again. Padma was working full time and I had just started my own business and our hands were full with Joseph and his school activities. Meanwhile, Lorrie was busy with her two girls. Time crept by and I never got a chance to call and organise a get together. And once again we reached a period when too much time had passed and I assumed Lorrie had moved on. Lorrie’s mother had passed away and my mother had moved from Amery so we no longer received bulletins about each other from the home front.

Fast forward another 8 years or so. Nothing brings out the six degrees of separation better than Facebook. I was in the US last July for my sister’s wedding and I posted a pic and tagged my sister. A friend of a friend of a friend of Jenni’s liked the picture. When I saw the ‘LIKE’, I immediately wrote back. It was Lorrie. Much to my amazement she said she was still in the Adelaide Hills. I said I’d organise a get together once we returned.

And I finally did but it took another six months. Last weekend the families of two former Amery residents who had been living a mere 20 kilometres apart for nearly 20 years finally got together along with another family of half Americans living in the Hills. For me it was wonderful to sit at home and talk with someone about the Twin Lakes, the railway track and old Miss Halvorsen. It brought back memories of growing up in small town America that had long disappeared. But the greatest part of seeing Lorrie was to meet her family. The Amery gal has done well in Australia and has a beautiful family.

I’m confident now that when either Lorrie or I miss Wisconsin or want to talk about growing up in Amery that now we finally know we’ve got someone just down the road who will speak our own language