You gotta have friends!

To be a good friend and to appreciate the value of friendship requires honesty and concentration.  It's a vulnerable position, but one that's well worth it.    IT takes effort and time.  

I'm so grateful for my ward friends.  I have known and been around these people for 24 years.  We have gone through changing  family sizes and church callings.  We have survived deaths and weddings together.  We have  shared food and camps and too many meetings to count.  We have "service club"  which is really an excuse to see a matinee movie.

Christiina Barlow, Nan Bruske, Me, Jan Hedberg, Angie Smith, Jo Cash, Si Foster, Mel Evans, Kathleen Newman, Amber Crane

I love my theater friends...Maurie, Jan, Julie, Meghan, Holly, Shelley, Lori, Mickey......  They get my need for acting, singing, performing....broadway etc.  I have had girl crushes on  some of them since college days.  We can talk Sondheim to Lerner and Loewe til we are blue...and then analyze it all again tomorrow.  We can sing our guts out through an entire Rodgers and Hammerstein song book.  We sing at the top of our lungs and at the drop of a hat. 

I am thankful for my neighbor friends.  We watch out for each others houses and garbages when on vacation. We snow blow and take care of pets and children.  We see the changing of the cars and wonder who is driving what now? We put up with extra cars parked on the street and wave hi from our driveways at coming home time. I have two old neighbors moving out this spring and will be getting new neighbors.  I can't believe it.

I'm grateful for the lunch bunch that gets together to celebrate birthdays and girl weekends a few times a year.  These work as therapy for me and a chance  to talk and catch up.  We have been doing this consistantly for 15 years now.  These friends are more cheerleader than critic.  They listen, advise, laugh and don't judge.

Diane Lake, Laura Belnap, Heidi Bingham, Erin Blake, Si Foster, Me, Kimi Farley, Kim Johnston

Grateful for my friends I made when first married, living in West Bountiful.  Leslie, Becky, Darlene, Paula, Janet....especially  thinking of Linda and how strong and postive she always is.  We have seen each  of our children  come into this world...and grow ...and go...and our lives change right along with it.   It's great to catch up in the chance meeting at a store or on social media.

I have my High School friends.... we stay in touch mostly with facebook, wedding announcements of our children, and  christmas cards.  It's interesting to see what paths their lives took.  

I love my friend Si who gets me exercising a couple of days a week..and let's me pour out my heart as well.  She talks me through my parenting mishaps and gives me ideas of "what's for dinner?" She is always beautiful.

I love my Laura...she "gets" me... and my lack of homemaking skills and my desire to be more honest, more loving, more authentic....more like her.   We have been chaperones on SOOOO many choir trips and we had more fun than the kids, of course. Laura loves and "channels" my mom almost as much as I do.  

Author Anne Quindlen writes about her friends, "These ladies are as essential to my life as my work or my home, a kind of freely chosen family connected by affinity instead of ties of blood."  

Kaye and Malinda were my besties in jr high. I go back through my journals and their names are on every other page. We had a jr high pact to get boys to ask us to the school valentines dance when  we were in 8th grade. It was called opoeration VD.   We didn't know that VD also stood for Venerial Disease til high school. So young.  So naive.  Our hints to the boys we liked with help from notes sent to and fro from each other to them all paid off...we actually got asked to dance and didn't have to hang with the wall flowers.   We were all 9th grade pep club officers and even traveled for three weeks in a study abroad  student trip to Mexico with our favorite spanish teacher, Mrs. Daniels.  

Melinda, Kaye Cushing, Melissa Holt, Malinda Bean 1977

When I was young I used to make fun of the two older couples in the car with the men in the front seat and the women in the back, or to be at a party with the men in one room and the women in the other. I totally get it now.  I love my women friends. 

Don't know where I would be without these amazing women and many more not pictured.  I treasure them.