I have a "30-somethings" buddy!

A great big Happy Birthday goes out to my dearest friend, Jenn! She is the first of my best friends to turn thirty with me this year! This is the second picture she and I ever took together. We had thought it was the first, but my mom recently found one of us together is 11 year olds and sent that to me, it is the next picture down.

In honor of Jenn's birthday, I thought I would recap our friendship a bit. So here goes, it may be a bit sketchy, but you'll have to forgive an old woman and her fading memory! (ha ha ha! I'm going to milk this old age thing! Old people can get away with a whole lot more than young people can!)

Okay, we moved to Georgia somewhere around November of 1986 and one of the very first people I remember meeting was Jenn and her mom. The way I remember it was that either my mom and her mom were visiting teaching companions or my mom was her visiting teacher, or something like that because I remember going along with my mom to her house to visit with her. I remember walking up to the house behind my mom and seeing a girl about my age hiding behind her mom on the other side of a screen door in what I think was a kitchen. I don't remember what happened from there, and oddly enough, that is about all the memory of our first meeting that Jenn has as well! I recently asked her what memory she had of us meeting and this was the way her story went:

"I simply recall being with my Mom while she was visiting a sister from the church. I believe I was standing in the kitchen by the table next to my Mom and I saw you through the screen door. You opened it and came in. We were both shy, but we began talking. Honestly the next thing in my memory is that we were forever more inseperable!"

And that really was the way it was for us! She lived on one side of Riverdale, Ga and we lived on the other side and in Jonesboro, but we still managed to spend all the time we could at each other's houses! We were 9 then, and now that I have an 9 year old myself, I can't imagine letting her spend the amount of time away from me that Jenn and I spent away from our parents! She and I had so many sleep overs and weekend overs that if Teagan knew how often I was away from the house, I might have some explaining to do!

We really were inseperable and that was how we wanted to stay. We made big plans of marrying twin brothers and living next door to each other and letting our kids grow up together. We wanted a big backyard, that was actually both our yards with just one fence around the whole thing, with some tall trees that would be perfect climbing trees for us and our kids and that we could put a tire swing on. There was also going to be a creek running through it for our kids to be able to explore and learn from like she and I had all the times we played in the creek behind my house. We are both married now, and not to the twins of our plans (but to wonderful studly men of our own!), but I am still holding out for that joint backyard thing and living next door to each other! I just have to find a way to make it possible for her husband to be able to surf somewhere in Provo (that is a passion of his) and then she can come live here!

We spent the next three years being the absolute best of friends. Connected at the hip and at the mind. We made our families sit next to each other in church so we could be together, we sat next to each other in Primary and Class, and I often remember sharing a chair with her because there weren't two empty chairs next to each other. I also remember that we would sometimes argue (usually about something little) and get heated up and then we would snap out of it really quickly and hug each other and apologize. We would say that it was just Satan trying to break our friendship apart because he knew how close we were and how strong a force we were together and that were eternal friends and he didn't like that and wanted to stop it. (yeah, it is silly, but who wasn't silly at 9?! And who is to say that it wasn't true?)

We went through all the changing and growing that you go through during that 9-11 age and it made it so much easier going through it with a "twin seperated at birth". I remember going to a college class "Growing Up and Understanding It" with her and her mom (my mom had to go to an award ceremony for my sister and couldn't make it) I don't remember a whole lot from the class other than it was a really hot auditorium with lots of people, there were some fairly graphic slides, and the teacher was pregnant (which Jenn and I thought it was very appropriate for her to be teaching us these things!). We were really excited to be turning 12 in 1990, with the thought that we could go to Young Women's together and not be lonely Beehives by ourselves. I was going to turn 12 the week before she would, so I would have to spend one terrible week by myself and then she would be there to support me from then on. So I went my first lonely week looking forward to the next Sunday when we woudl be in Young Women's together. And then during the week in between, she and her family had to suddenly move to Washington... it was that quick and she was gone. I remember helping them pack up their house and I kept praying that I would wake up from this bad dream. Then the last memory I have of the time period when we were actually together is us driving away from her house with me looking out the back window of our car until we turned the corner - seeing them standing there waving and finishing packing their car up. Going Young Women's didn't hold the thrill for me it had before she left.

We wrote to each other on and off through the years - sent each other birthday gifts, care packages, phone cards. She moved quite a bit through her teen years and even though we tried to figure out some way to visit each other, it wasn't until the summer of 1996 that we got to see other again. I was out in Arizona visiting my dad before heading out to BYU, my friend Annike was there with me, and Jenn was in town for some reason and we were able to get together for one splendid day at the pool at my dad's house! It was wonderful, but entirely too short!

It would be another 6 years before we were able to get together again. This time she came out to Georgia and spent a week with us. That was pure ecstacy! One way you can tell how true a friendship is (in my experience), is if even after spending long periods of time apart, if you can pick up just as though it had only been a day and still feel just as comfortable and wonderful around your friend as you did the last time you were together ~ and that is how it is with she and I. Of course we had things to catch up on, but we were still close and still had fun just sitting around together reading our own books or going for a walk around the block with baby Teagan.

The next time we were able to get together was in late 2005 and once again she was the one to do the leg work and she came out to Utah to visit us. She was able to stay with us for another couple of days and life was great again. In the time we had spent apart she had gone on a mission to Hong Kong, come home, and married the guy she had written me about so many times as a teeneager when she dated him then. That picture is of her teaching my kids how to spit pomegranite seeds the right way (which was a favorite memory we had together - eating my sister's pomegranites and sitting on the back of our car spitting the seeds out as kids.)

Since then, we have gotten together two more times, once when we drove out to California to visit family there - we met up at the Oakland Temple (which I think was a two hour drive or so for her and her hubby and their newborn daughter). And then we met up again a couple of weeks ago when she was once again in town (it was only a 45 minute drive for me to go visit her, so that was a no brainer for me! All she had to do was give me a time and an address and I was there!)

So there it is, our total time spent together is less than 4 years, but we have always been together through out everything, regardless of where we physically were. She is my friend I have had the longest; we have been friends for over 2 decades and I don't see any end in sight. I do believe that once in a while you have the chance to meet someone that you knew from your premortal life. People that you automatically feel like you know ~ "bosom buddies" as Anne of Avonlea would say. She is one of those people for me ~ as cheesy 11 year olds we came up with "our song" and I still think of her every time I hear it or think about it. It was a song from the movie Beaches, "You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings" and that is what she has always been for me. Just knowing that I had her as a true soul friend was sometimes all I needed to know for me to feel loved.

At first I had thought about doing another 30 things list, this time about the things I love about my friend Jenn. But then I thought that since I am also kind of using this blog as bit of a personal history, I thought it better to write a brief summary of our lives together. So, thanks to everyone who bore with me as I took a walk down memory lane (us old women do that occasionally, dont'cha know?) and there it is in a cyberspace nutshell. And to you Jenn, once again, I hope you had a very happy birthday and I will forever thank you for being a huge part of my life and for always being the wind beneath my wings!