I want to show you one of the most beautiful women I know.This is my best friend Sarah.
Best friend sounds so middle school, do people still call each other this? The title almost feels like I should be grouping her in with my favorite color or lucky number. She is more than a best friend.
Sarah was my first real friend who wasn't a relative or neighborhood kid my mother babysat. Or maybe that isn't true either. We met in kindergarten through a mutual friend which is what makes me think I had a friend before Sarah. We were both shy children who grew to find our voice in each other.
We have so many stories.
She was the oldest of her siblings and I was the baby of the family. Her little sister and brother always came in handy when we wanted to play house because I wanted to be the mom and Sarah would say, "I want to be the cat."
When we were little we loved to dig for worms and upturn stones to find salamanders. We were Girl Scouts. We made recycled paper out of dryer lint. We sang in choir where Sarah had the job of holding up a paper plate with a drawing of the sun on it in our fifth grade concert during a song about summer.
She was always cooler than me.
Her parents took us on vacation to Lake George when we were in elementary school, Sarah and I sat rear facing in the family's station wagon on the drive up. I remember feeling so cool as we waved to the drivers behind us all the way to New York. It was on this trip that Sarah and I walked all around the campground pretending we were sleuths from the show Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego. It was on this trip that we spotted a large steamboat named the Minnehaha and I commented, "If that's the Mini Haha I wonder what the big one looks like!" and never lived it down.
We took trips to her grandparents' house which had a pool that would attract frogs in the summertime, the gold at the end of a rainbow to two little girls who loved all things animal.
Sarah taught me the song The Littlest Worm, which is all about eating a worm and regurgitating it in your sister's bed.
We've lived through it together.
We were climbing the crabapple tree in her front yard when her mom received a phone call that my mother was being admitted to a mental hospital for the first time. We were nine.
We've been there through loss of pets, loved ones, breakups. We lived through time zones when Sarah went off to college in Australia when I would ask her how the weather was going to be tomorrow--since Australia is that far ahead of us--and what lottery numbers I should play.
She's the kind of friend who will come over to help you clean your fish tank.
She's the kind of friend who you can sit on a couch with while breastfeeding your newborn son and not worry that she is judging you for having National Geographic breasts.
She is the girl you can talk to about absolutely everything.
Sarah recently moved to England with her handsome and sweet British husband Luke. The move has been hard on us because we're homesick for each other. But man am I happy for her to have such a beautiful home which she will no doubt rock with her interior design skills. I'm happy that she has such a wonderful man in Luke.
And the best thing about having a best friend like Sarah for twenty-four long years is photos like this:
Oh dear god.