Photo Credit: Jane Haire
That any two people meet is so brilliantly random, yet at the same time can feel inevitable.
In 1977, Jane Osland, an 18-year-old exchange student, came to Pine Plains for her senior year of high school. Osland hailed from a small town herself – the tiny coastal village of Flokenes, where there were few roads and where inhabitants traveled by boat in the Norwegian Sea.
One night she was invited to a party in Clinton Corners. Walking down the stairs to the room where people were gathered, she immediately noticed a handsome, cheerful young man, with children and dogs tumbling around him.
And so she met Jim Haire. And Jim met Jane. It appeared to be love at first sight.
Jim and Jane started dating and they didn’t stop. The wrenching moment of parting when Jane had to return home at the end of the school year hurt all the more when she discovered that she was pregnant with their child.
Deciding to marry was easy; making that happen less so. But, in March of 1979, Jim – by then a student at Columbia-Greene Community College – traveled to Norfjordeid, Norway for the birth of the couple’s first daughter, Josefine. The next week, they were married.
Forty-four years later, now with three children and six grandchildren, Jane and Jim live happily in the house they built in Pine Plains – ringed by hills and fields, and under the same sky, the same sun and moon, as the one that shelters Flokenes.