Photo blog keeps best friends together
Photo blog keeps best friends together
When my best friend's mother died last year, I was 700 miles away. It was one of the hardest and saddest times in Heather's life, and I wasn't there. She was in New York and I was in North Carolina, so far away it hurt.
We corresponded through e-mail; talking on the phone was just too hard for her. Line by line, I tried to console her as she talked about her fears and the details of the last few days before her mother passed. I just don't want to lose her, she told me. All I wanted to do was hold my friend, the same way she always held me through bad times.
Moments like those make me wish I were a block away from my best friend instead of a half-dozen states away. And as we both grow older and our lives change and our experiences become richer, I seem to miss her even more.
With every new milestone in our lives, I find myself wanting to be right there with her and she with me -- birthday dinners, promotions, births, even the little things, like successfully baking your first cherry pie. And then there are the sad moments when one of us is sick and we're both too far away to help the other.
Last week, her little girl was sick with the flu, spiking a fever of 106. I wanted so badly to make a batch of chicken soup and walk it over to her house. Instead, I had to settle for sending her a get-well card with a pack of new crayons and a set of sparkly barrettes to cheer her up.
To ease this geographic distance between us, Heather and I came up with a solution.
A few months ago, we created a photo blog where we each post one photo a day and write a few words about it. We post snapshots of our families and our friends, our homes and our yards -- simple moments in our everyday lives. Heather's photos reflect her love of plants and flowers, the joys of being a mother and life's daily gifts that she relishes -- her daughter running through a sprinkler, the lilacs in her yard, her toddler's baby pigtails.
Sure, it's not the same as carrying chicken soup to her house or chatting over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, but these daily glimpses into each other's lives makes me feel not so far away from her. In fact, it's even brought us closer.
When you live so far away from friends, you don't know about the little things in their lives, such as what her favorite coffee mug looks like or that her daughter likes to make up ice cream superheroes like Super Vanilla Girl. It's the little things that matter. Because of our blog, I know Heather's daughter has a special cereal bowl with a built-in straw, so she can suck up the milk when she's done, and that Heather made her husband take her to Burger King two nights in a row so she could collect all four "Star Trek" glasses.
Knowing these things makes me smile.
We've been posting to the blog for almost two months now and I still get excited to see Heather's posts.
In the evenings after dinner, I run to my computer to see her new photo, and if it's not up yet, I obsessively check back every five minutes. If it starts to get late into the night and she still hasn't posted, I start to worry about her. Is she sick? Did she have a bad day? Are the girls OK?
There are even moments when the blog makes me miss her more. Just two weeks ago, Heather went camping for a few days and was unable to post her photos for three days. I knew this, and yet I kept checking the blog, thinking maybe she'd surprise me with a photo or come home early from her trip.
I even clicked back to her older posts and read our comments to each other to make myself feel better. By day three, I called her cell on my way home from work, just to tell her that I missed her while she was gone.
She laughed and said the first thing she did as soon as she walked in the door was run right to the computer to see what I posted.
And that's the beauty of our blog. I never thought something so simple could make such a difference.
Contact Carla Kucinski Seward at 373-7319 or carla@gotriad.com
