friends from far away

Tonight, feeling deep in winter, I was looking at pictures from last summer.



Friends came for a week in July, and it was hot, and their kids are so beautiful, so dear to my heart.



Their mama and I have been friends for a good ten years now, but this is what I noticed in the summer pictures--how these two took to each other.

 When this little girl was born, another friend told me she cried when she heard her name.

Cried?! That's a strange reaction.

Well, I did too.  My friend named the child after her sister, and the middle name is Valerie.

Having a child named after you?  It's an honor that's impossible to even describe.

Julia talks about her even now all these months later, casually, conversational, about things they did, when we'll be together again.

We did go to visit them a few years ago, and this might be wrong, but we're such a mob.  I think it's hard to host a family of our proportions, but they did it, never complained, fed us well. They even took us to Niagara Falls, and that doesn't happen every day.

Sometimes a thousand miles seems like an unimaginable distance.  And other times it feels miraculous that two families could find each other at all in a world this big. 

R, love you for always, Val