Judy and I as delegates to the state Future Homemakers of America conference in 1971

I’m  not sure when we started signing our letters to one another this way. I think it was about the time we decided boys were cute. It became even more important to us when we discovered they could also break your heart. Judy and I shared all the typical things best friends share — chocolate milk with peanut butter and dark Cairo syrup for breakfast. Okay, maybe that was our own version of BFB. (Best Friend Breakfast.) And you will find us standing side by side in every photo from the time we were five years old all the way through our high school class reunions.

We shared our love for dolls and books and school with a passion. Then, we grew up. Well, sort of. We both got married and traded our dolls for real babies before we were twenty years old. We still loved books, but now we wanted to write them as much as we wanted to read them. And we still loved school, but we were too busy learning to do things like cut up a chicken and balance a checkbook to pursue higher education.

Eventually, though, my brave and beautiful friend took the most astounding step. She enrolled in college classes at a state university. Our paths had diverged by then, and though we still loved the same things, we rarely found time to share our confidential thoughts. We would go months, even years with no better communication than an exchange of cards around the time of our fall birthdays.

Yet, we could pick up in a minute when we got back in touch. When my twin granddaughters were born three months prematurely, Judy appeared at the Ronald McDonald house two hours away with food to stock the freezer and hugs to heal my soul. When my perfect marriage encountered the perfect storm, Judy listened on the other side of her computer screen while I poured out my confidential heart in the long, dark nights. The list goes on.

Today is Judy’s birthday. And I want to dedicate this blog to her because she has dedicated her friendship to me. We are both grandmothers now. We still love books (both writing and reading them) and we love the men we married even more than we loved them when they were boys.(the storms have passed, at least for now.) And school? We still love it. In fact, Judy now teaches English in the very school where we wrote the first notes signed Confidentially Yours.

I’m so proud to call her my friend. Happy Birthday.