περιπλάνηση: June 2019

A very happy 49th birthday to my Marci. It'll be our last 40-something go round.

We met when we were 15 and assigned to the same marching squad in summer band before our sophomore year. We bonded over another squad mate's incredible inability to never know her left foot from her right, and the fact that we both stared open mouthed with our eyes rolling back in our head when she was ALWAYS on the wrong foot.

She was an island for me when the crew I'd hung out with prior to our meeting started in on the Mean Girls stuff and I found myself odd-girl out.

She taught me Lariaette dance steps in her tiny room she shared with her two sisters, with this cool reflective stuff on the window that turned it into a mirror. She lived in a house with three siblings and I was the only child with grandparents living at home and a pool in the backyard. We enjoyed the other's very different homes more because of it.

We shared secrets and obsessed over boys and laughed at each others jokes, even when no one else knew what we were talking about.

She's terrible at making up fake names, but she's fearless on the phone.

We visited one another our freshman year at different colleges, and then shared our first apartment together off campus when I moved to Austin to go to UT for all of a year.

She was my maid of honor and I was hers. Well, technically, since I got married almost two years before her, I got to be the MATRON at the ripe old age of 22.

And then she lived in Plano and I was in Navasota and we rarely saw one another between me have littles and then about the time mine started school, she had littles and had moved to Austin.

But we kept in touch, hoping at some point our lives would intersect better.

And they did.

The kids grew up and moved on to college, both hers and mine. Mine are done with college. Hers graduate in the coming year.

And we managed to start having adventures again.

Then she and Ren bought a house 45 minutes from me (for at least part of the year), and although we still don't get together often, things seem to be bending in the right direction to find more time together.

She should be back in Colorado in another few weeks and here through the fall. And we have our 2019 New York week planned for November.

Here's to another 49 birthdays together.

I love you Marcelle Christine. Happy Birthday!