I met Dea in high school. More accurately, I noticed she wasn’t one of “everybody else” in 10th grade English class.
I had been having a particularly hard week, both at home and at school. I was starting to fiddle around with HTML during lunch hour in the school library, and there were nasty rumours being spread about what manner of website I was running. I stormed into class in tears and collapsed into my chair, perhaps a bit melodramatically. She just looked at me and said “Welcome to Hell, may I take your order?”
It was the first time I had laughed in months.
She changed schools after that year, but we stayed in touch more or less through email. She promised me on the last day of school that “no matter what, we’ll never lose touch”. Then Myspace came along and then Facebook, so even though she lives in Minnesota now and I’m in Florida, we are able to keep up our friendship.
We don’t sit on the phone for hours and chat, and we aren’t all up in each other’s business all the time, but she and I both know we can share anything. There’s never been an argument between us, nothing but love and support.
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Then there’s Michelle – who my son, Ian, calls “Shell-love” (her sons call me “Mama E”). I met her through Craigslist. She had advertised her availability to care for a child in her home. I liked her writing style and the picture of her family looked pleasant and she lived close to me, so I sent an email basically saying “I don’t need a babysitter, but can our babies play?” We met the next day at the zoo and have been besties ever since. She’s more family than I’ve ever had.
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And then there’s our resident awesome jelly – @cazzie. I met her here, and we consider ourselves sisters. Because we are. DNA be damned.