Go Vanessa, it's yo birthday!

Vanessa a.k.a. Waneka a.k.a. Eunice a.k.a. Vanista a.k.a. Semona was born on none other than Friday Ausust 13th 1976!
She is my besteset of best friends. We met through our big sisters who finally saw fit to introduce us one hot day in Mississippi in 1982 or there abouts.
I remember listening to Brandi (my big sister) and Karla (Vanessa's big sister) hatch the plan to get us together one afternoon. "They both love Barbies, and they both love horses!" they reasoned, plus it would get their little sisters off their backs. So on that day in the early 80s I waited and waited for Vanessa's Dad to bring to her my Mimi & Pop's house to play. I had actually laid eyes on her before, twice.

Vanessa knows how we kick it in innertubes on the pond!
One time, a long time ago I was in Pop's barn negotiating all the cow shit on the floor. I spied a shy Vanessa standing on the rail by the long trough, she was checkin' me out. "Who is this city girl!?" I'm guessing she thought. Seeing I had a captive audience I decided to try out a phrase I picked up from my cousin that visit. "Gag me with a spoon!" I said of the bountiful cow pies.
The second time, I think I mentioned this before but-the second time I was in the car with Mom, we were dropping Bran off with Karla. They had this long, hard packed dirt & Mississippi kind of pea gravel driveway hemmed in by a field on one side and a field and then woods on the other. As we were leaving me & Mom saw a gray & red streak fly by the car. It was that fiery red head atop her trusty steed, a gray pony named-wait for it-Dusty!
Here is a High School aged Vanessa, senior year I think. Just a bunch of no good teenagers loitering somewhere.
But as I was saying, finally she arrived at Mimi & Pop's house, I had waited for FOREVER! We watched Rocky & Bullwinkle in "the orange room", then we played Barbies at the foot of the stairs. We've pretty much been BFFs ever since.

Vanessa makes an excellent witch on Halloween!
Eunice really gets to shine when attending an annual White Trash Party. Check out the black eye! She does the best white trash act; she's from Mississippi.
Here is a rare shot of us as teenagers hangin' out with her friends. I'm on the far right and Vanessa is against the column to my left.
Those were the days! Actually, those were not my favorite days, probably not hers either, but we still had each other:)
This is one of my favorite sites. The only thing better is the same thing, but with everybody bareback on a horse. Bran leads the way, then Karla, then Vanessa.
We had an amazing and sadly rare opportunity to get together last month, just the four of us, no kids! It was when I was painting Dad's house, they all three came out, we swam in the pond and walked around the farm. We caught locusts and threw them into the webs of Writing Spiders and took pictures. It was epic. That was Karla's birthday!

Vanessa is shy, hilarious, dependable, smart as a whip, fun, insightful, loyal, thoughtful, self reliant, she rocks just in general. Hers is the doorstep you show up on at 3 AM when you've just left your husband. She is the friend you call at 1 AM to ask to take your dog out for you in the morning because you're running off to the beach with a guy on the first date. She is the friend who moves to Hawaii to work there for a year and asks you to drive her new car the whole time she's gone. She's the friend you rely on for things too personal to even write in your own blog.
She's the one you call when it's 4 AM here and God knows what time in Hawaii when you've been on Prednisone for three weeks straight and you think your head is going to explode! Some day, God forbid, when one of my parents dies she will be the one I call to come sit with me and cry and who won't have to say anything at all, because I'll know that she understands; we did that when her mother passed years ago. She's the one who has countless letters from me from the years of our friendship, many of which she could totally black mail me but never has! She's the one who's boxes of letters I still have, even one from kid-dom she wrote after her hamster George died and a tear dropped onto the paper while she was writing and she circled it in pencil and wrote "my tear" with an arrow pointing at it.
She's the little girl in the picture with me & my Mimi picking tomatoes in Mississippi.
She's my oldest, nearest & dearest best friend.
She's The One.