MY FIRST FRIEND!

Today was a truly amazing day and I am still on cloud 9. I reconnected with my childhood best friend from many,many years ago. We found each other on Facebook a few weeks ago and decided to meet for lunch today. From the second I walked through the door of Farotto's my heart almost burst! We had almost 30 years to catch up on.

Julie was my other half growing up. Where she was...I was. We met when we were 4 years old and lived directly across the street from each other Every picture of me when I was little consisted of a tall blond with straight hair and a shorter brunette with curly hair. We were inseparable. We vacationed together, we walked to school together, we played sports together, we got in trouble together (one time we ate an entire pound of bacon that her mom had made for potato salad...while she was taking a shower getting ready for a party...oops!) we lived life together. Neither one of us had siblings but we were as close as any sisters could be.

I have so many funny memories of Julie I couldn't even begin to list them but here are a few that were discussed today. Julie and I would walk to school together every single morning from a VERY early age. And since our parents worked (this was before the "latchkey" days) we left for school after our parents. (Can you imagine this happening now?) and got home before them. The rule was Julie couldn't come in the house before school. I think my Dad thought that we would never make it to school which is probably pretty accurate. Well, little did they know that Julie came over every single morning before school. Well, this particular day my Dad happened to come home while Julie was there so I shoved her in the coat closet until my Dad was out of sight and then literally threw her out the front door. I remember my Dad asking who was at the door and I said " I didn't hear the door." I am sure he knew but for some reason he gave me some grace!

I remember playing in my backyard for hours on my aluminum swing set. We would swing so hard the poles would jump out of the ground. I don't know how we didn't tip that thing over...maybe we did! I remember Julie loved butter and jelly sandwiches and I loved ketchup sandwiches...disgusting! I remember countless weekends at the river when we would camp and hang out all day on the mighty Mississippi (yuck!). Julie was much more fair complected than I was and so she would burn and blister while I was golden brown :) Our parents would tie our life jackets to a rope attached to the boat so we wouldn't float down the river. Insane! We would sit in our exact same spots in the boat every time...me on the red side, Julie on the green (the color of the light at the front of the boat) and we would listen to music and ride all day long until the sun went down. We loved CCR and Donna Summers. (The first five songs on the blog are dedicated to you Julie...what memories!)

I realized today that she is the only person on this Earth that shares these memories with me. We were able to piece our childhood back together today with each of us remembering different pieces of the puzzle. It is funny when someone remembers something that you had completely forgotten! There is no one else that could do this for me because all we had growing up, was each other.

It was fun realizing after all of these years how parallel our lives have been...we are both nurses (that don't work..ha!), both of our moms suffered from breast cancer and we live about 15 minutes from each other. Not to mention that when we met for lunch we were wearing almost the exact same outfit! We always did like to dress the same. Amazing.

And so after almost 5 hours, a bottle of wine (plus some more!) and NO lunch... a friendship was renewed. I felt like we were those 4 year olds again learning how to do cart wheels and chasing the ice cream man. I am so thrilled to have her back in my life. What a gift I was given today!!