I cannot tell the story of my life without including Brooke and in honor of her birthday, I want to tell you a little bit about her.
“She was the first person I didn’t try to convert. She was the first person who began awakening my understanding that believing in God meant more than just professing a name or attending a house of worship.
Brooke was someone I could trust, and I did. She’s the one who graciously caught me as I tumbled, a little dazed, out of the spin cycle of my life and helped set me on my feet. She questioned things – faith, religion, politics – and she didn’t mind if I did either.
I’m writing about Brooke while I’m wearing a ratty old T-shirt from a 2005 trip we took to St. Louis with a bunch of friends. We went to a Cardinals baseball game. The front of the shirt says, “I’m with them” and on the back is the nickname she’s called me for years: Hols Balls. I don’t remember how I earned that.
The T-shirt has survived many evolutions of closet purging. Some things just belong and this is one of them. So is she.
Yes, I’m trying to draw a thin comparison between my best friend and a “ratty old T-shirt.” I’ll stop.
My fingers momentarily stopped typing because suddenly I was overflowing with memories of the times her and I have had together since we met at that Days Inn on the south side of town.
She rode horses with me on the farm where I taught her how to lope.
We found our dogs on the Internet and brought them home within days of each other. There was the time I kept her dog at my house for three weeks and the time she kept one of mine at hers.
There was her wedding and then her moving away from Kentucky and the time I went to visit her in North Carolina. We took a ferry to an island to look for wild mustangs. We found them.
We canoed on some river in North Carolina – her, her husband and I. I recently discovered he’s still mildly bitter over the fact that I apparently did not do my paddling part.
There was getting the farmhouse ready for their return home, and then they returned home and a few months later, I moved to New Mexico.
There was our road trip to New Mexico.
There were pregnancies and a baby shower and then Vinn’s arrival and birthday parties.
When my dearest dog died, I was on the phone with Brooke. When her dearest dog died, she waited till I returned from Haiti to tell me.
We’ve shared beds and meals, tragic times and good times, adventure and boring nights in. We’ve lamented people’s stupidity and drank too much. We’ve dreamed and reasoned, taken leaps and held each other back from the ledges we were teetering on. We’ve transitioned through significant phases of our lives and lived very far apart.
She has borne with me my heaviest grief, my greatest triumphs and my most notorious dumb-assness.
Of the two of us, I’m the one who retrieves items from top shelves and I get the long side of the couch. Basically, she’s short. And highly organized.
And she’s a city girl who married a farmer.
When she moved into the drafty old farmhouse at her in-law’s farm many miles from … anything, I was a little bit worried. And I was quickly impressed, because she just didn’t move in. She adopted the whole thing.
She painted her kitchen a tasteful John Deere green and yellow and decorated the bathroom with farm relics and a note to her husband: “Have a great day back on the farm!” The note is still there.
She works on the farm now and she knows more about farming than I do. There have been good years and bad years, bumper crops and barely enough. She’s made peace with hunting season and deer jerky.
This is my friend and her selfless ability to say: “Hey, I like you and I like this dream of ours. Let’s make it happen,” and with her flare of punctual organization and impeccable taste, she makes her space beautiful and efficient.
I am still impressed by her.”
Happy birthday to my soul-friend – the one who knows all and loves me for it.
Comments