Happy Birthday, Suzanne!

I am dedicating this post to my best friend of 31 years! Suzanne is from England and I met her in 1979. We became best friends immediately when we met~it's as if we were always together~maybe in another realm. She's blonde and I am brunette. Our colors are on the opposite of the color wheel. She is an artist, a decorator,a teacher,a gardener, a wonderful cook and can cook up a gourmet meal with nothing in the house but flour, butter and sugar and she can do it in record time and it will be artistically presented! I've known her as we've made block prints and printed walls 'cause I couldn't afford wallpaper and we've painted my fireplace when I could afford it. We've decorated, used our ingenuity on how to make a delicious meal for four with 1/4 pound of ground beef, suntanned, sketched and painted, raised children, complained, fussed, shopped, seen ghosts together and talked till dawn whether she is at her home in Florida, my home or in England. We've been married and unmarried and back to married again. We've shared secrets..all those things best girl friends do. She and her husband would put 2 life jackets on me and we would row on their lake in the late summer evenings (I am afraid of water). We had our palms read in New Orleans and pretty much had the same readings! Whenever I don't feel right, I call her and she tells me what holistic remedies and vitamins to take...I'm always cured.

Our happiest times in our lives, we mutually and tearily recall, were when we did not have very much money way back in 1980. One particular time, we dressed up (we always dress up though)and slipped on our stilleto heels (she can STILL wear them~I can't-boo hoo) and lunched and shopped with $2 a piece in each of our pocketbooks. We looked smashing and turned heads and ate the best lunch~ salad, soup and dry vermouth with a twist of lime (English martini) graciously offered by our wonderful mutual babysitter's dad sitting at the next table, and shopped in wonderful shops with that $4.00 in quaint Nashville, Indiana. We were offered tea and cookies in a delightful little "up a small winding staircase" plant shop and were able to each purchase a potted fragrant herb. We had many repeat happy times like that. We felt rich.

Our outfits and jewelry are still admired and we still have lunches like that, now we are able to add a delicious slice of quiche with our salad and dry vermouth martini and we feel rich. We are very, very rich in friendship.
Happy Birthday, Suzanne, Love ya!