special friends

On the very last morning of our trip to Marco Island, Will and I got a very special treat: a visit from my friend Anne, her husband Tom, and their adorable son Adam.

This wasn't any old playdate (aside from being Will's first). Anne and I met in 2003 at Boston College, and quickly developed a really unique sort of friendship. She is a couple of years older than me, so we didn't have the same groups of friends at BC and would probably have never met if not for a service trip to St. Thomas that we both went on at the end of my freshman year and her junior year. Right away we found unusual comfort in each other amidst the unfamiliar places and experiences that such a trip entails. We both bonded with a little boy we met in an orphanage in St. Thomas named Malachai. He was just a baby on that first trip, and Anne and I were overjoyed to hold him in our arms and give him the love he so deserved. We led another trip to St. Thomas a year later, and returned to the same orphanage, and to our same little boy, who by then was a busy toddler with a lot less interest in cuddles.

I couldn't find a picture of just me and Anne, but here are a couple of us individually with children from the orphanage:






And this was Malachai then:



To think he is now eleven-years-old is mind-blowing. I wonder what his life is like today.

Anne graduated from BC when I was a sophomore and returned to Minnesota, where she grew up and where her family still lives. I went on with my college life and we kept in sporadic touch, exchanging the occasional card and email. Our communication grew more infrequent as time went on, but I never stopped thinking of Anne or finding comfort in the fact of our friendship.

It wasn't until this time last year, when I found out I was pregnant with Will, that our friendship kicked into high gear once again. Overwhelmed and a little scared, and with no friends who have children or are married, I remembered that Anne had a little boy in June of 2009. At nine-weeks-pregnant, I sent Anne an email asking for any and all advice she might have. Her reply contained the most sensitive and calming words I had heard since I learned about my pregnancy, and thus began a weekly written correspondence that continues to this day. In the age of text messages and facebook posts and IMs, Anne and I are writers of letters, albeit digital ones, about motherhood and growing up and jobs and friendship and everything in between. I owe much of my sanity throughout my pregnancy and the many changes of the last year to Anne and our letters.

And so, when we discovered that our vacations in Marco Island (of all places) would be overlapping by about 12 hours, we knew we had to make a visit happen. Eight years and two little boys of our very own later, here we are hanging by the pool.

We've promised each other it will not be another eight years until our next visit. In the meantime, the letter-writing continues, and our boys grow, and so do we.