The details of when I first met Michelle are a bit fuzzy, but I suppose the memory of a six year old is not the most reliable. Michelle was the new girl in class our first grade year and since my mom always taught me I should go out of my way to make new students feel welcome, I did just that. It was in one of those moments that our friendship blossomed and it wasn’t long before we became inseparable. Michelle was my first true, meaningful friendship, my first best friend.
Our gradeshool years were filled with sleepovers! At Michelle’s house we dressed up in her mom’s makeup, put on funky clothes (which I am proud to say included stirrup stretch pants, florescent pink tops with matching socks and New Kids on the Block hats) and strutted our stuff around the fish hatchery and along the banks of the Columbia River. At my house we were footloose and fancy free on the farm; swimming for hours, riding the three wheeler, staying up late talking and making up silly dance routines to Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.
The end of our fifth grade year brought the news that Michelle was moving. I was devastated and truly thought my world was coming to an end. I didn’t know what I was going to do without my best friend. We both promised to write and our mothers promised to drive us to see each other in the summers. Everyone made good on their promises. We wrote letters like dedicated pen pals but with the flare of best friends, sharing all of our feelings and secrets. Over the years, this resulted in multiple shoe boxes full of letters! During the summer months we would take turns staying at each other’s house for up to a week at a time. I visited her on multiple occasions when she lived in Enterprise and Cascade Locks. We always kept in touch.
By the time she moved to the coast we were in high school and our contact dwindled, as one might expect from busy high school girls. We saw each other only a handful of times and wrote fewer letters, but still remained good friends. As luck would have it, we ended up attending the same university and lived together my last year in college. It is there that I met her new best friend, Katie, and she and I became instant friends as well. It was so fun to be close to her again after all those years and we seemed to pick up right where we left off. A few years later, my husband and I moved to Salem while Michelle was going to beauty school. We had a house with an empty bedroom and she was looking for cheaper rent, so once again we became roommates! We used to always joke that we would never be able to get rid of each other!
Michelle has always held a unique place and been a solid fixture in my life. I always admired how she stayed true to herself and her beliefs, never wavering or being influenced by the crowd, even at a young age. She was there for me during all the important times, good and bad; including when I chopped my hair off in third grade and was devastatingly mistaken for a boy, to being with me the night I met my future husband, to sitting with me as I sobbed and broke the news that my mom was dying. As young girls we shared the innocence of childhood and as adults we conquered life’s challenges.
We shared a long journey; she and I. There is hardly a time I don’t recall her being in my life. I miss sharing my life with her and being part of hers. I miss her sense of humor, her wit, her sarcasm, her inability to use the word “well” correctly, and her style. But mostly I miss my oldest pal and the bond that can only be built through twenty six years of friendship.