Author hugging her friend

A friend hugging a friend

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

—A.A. Milne

A little piece of my heart left for Tennessee. As I write, my friend is driving to her new home ten hours and three states away.

I’ve never been one to speak of “best” friends, nor ever once to sport a broken-heart, BFF necklace.

Instead I’ve long praised “different friends for different reasons” and “changing friends in different seasons.” I don’t think I’m changing my tune.

But that doesn’t mean certain friends don’t rise to the top.

It doesn’t mean Christin didn’t take a piece of my heart.

She might be embarrassed to read this. But I think she will read it. Which, I confess, is one many reasons Christin is such a dear friend. She reads my stuff. Even with the typos.

By friendship you mean the greatest love, the greatest usefulness, the most open communication, the noblest sufferings, the severest truth, the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds of which brave men and women are capable.

—Jeremy Taylor

Christin is my free-spirit friend. She is the perfect complement to my tightly-scheduled life. She is the one who would text, “Wanna walk in ten?” She’s also the one who makes lasagna from scratch, I mean the whole thing, starting with on-the-vine tomatoes. She’s also the one who brightened more than one sad day with her incomparable crème brûlée. She, like me, likes butter, cream and cheese.

We met 14 years ago when she was the fresh face at Cathe’s Bible study; she and her brand-new baby boy. Christin now has two teenaged sons and a darling daughter. Our frienship grew over years of Thursday studies and muffins at Cathe’s (I wrote about my special friendship with Cathe here.)

If you know me in real life, you know I love to walk. Christin was, yes, my “best” walking friend. She was my walk-and-talk friend. Her pace was always perfect. I don’t know how many Sunday afternoons we walked these country roads, sometimes in rain, sometimes in snow. But I’m pretty sure it was more than a hundred, and we’d walk five miles. It would start as four, but we were rarely done talking in four miles, so we’d head down to the corner again. By my estimation, togther we hace we’ve walked 500 miles.

Make that 563 miles, give or take nine. Because Christin is also the one who hiked the whole 21-mile Geneva Lake shoreline path with me, not once, but thrice. We quibbled about the distance, hence the give or take. She says it was a few miles more than 21, and the way I zig and zag, she may be right.

Our walks are paused for now.

Two women friends hiking together

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.

—E.B. White

So friend, I’ll miss your hugs, including the sweaty post-walk hugs. I’ll miss your cheeful spontaneity and your and practical, edible kindness. I’ll miss how you listen so well, and how sometimes when I’m going on you even hold up your arm and say, “Look. I’ve got goosebumps.”

I’ll especially miss you on Thursday mornings and Sunday afternoons and whenever my blues call for crème brûlée. Thank you for being a keeper of my story these last years. And thank you for opening wide my heart to me. Thank you for being my friend.

I’m excited to see how God writes your next chapter. You can’t make old friends. But I pray that God will provides some good, new friends in Tennessee.

Christin, thank you for being gold.

As a fair exchange—I speak as to my children—open wide your hearts also.

—2 Corinthians 6:13 (NIV)