I’ve been friends with Jeanine for 25 years.  We’ve raised 5 kids between us, sewed endless smocked dresses, John-John’s, curtains and dust ruffles.  She is largely responsible for any expensive hobby I have ever participated in over the last 25 years.  She got me interested in sewing, which led to all things Bernina.  She started grinding flour and making bread, so I started grinding flour and making bread, which led to a grain mill and a Bosch mixer.  Our minds literally think the same thoughts.  We finish each others sentences and much goes unsaid as unnecessary.  We just know it. Here in Greenville, where I live now, she is known to my friends as “my best friend Jeanine who lives in Atlanta.” She’s that friend.

Last week we vacationed together with our husbands in Costa Rica.  We’ve taken many vacations together over the years, but this is the first one without any of those five kids. (When we’d take all those kids to the beach, she and I would draw a circle around our beach chairs and tell the kids they couldn’t come inside our circle.  It didn’t work.) It was the rainy season in Costa Rica, but that just meant a little rain every afternoon, usually during nap time.  It also meant beautiful sunsets and even a full end to end rainbow.  Just to be honest, Jeanine took the picture of the rainbow.  I was napping.

Everybody ought to have a friend that goes all the way back.