Friendship

These three ladies are my "oldest" friends. We don't like the word old, so we'd better not catch you using it. It's just a relative term here, understand?

Our lives are intertwined like the thickest kudzu vines the South has to offer; the only way you can understand our complex familial relationships is to either a) lived in our hometown your whole life, b) graduated from high school with us or, c) spent a lazy afternoon on the beach with us, sharing a bottle of cheap wine and diagramming our family trees and multi-generational friendships in the sand.

We have been friends through sunshine and through shadows, and some of those shadows have been the deepest and darkest one could ever imagine.

Somehow though, we do always seem to find the sunshine, and it always amazes me that it's not the sunshine that makes our friendship strong, it's the dark shadows.