Birthday for Fifers

May Day = Fiona's birthday...

It's hard to believe, but I have known Fiona for 22 years (there's no way I'm that old...by "that old" I mean 22!)...I'm not sure when or how we met. Fiona often tells me that I have a scary memory for detail, but that's one detail I cannot remember at all. Some people (our moms) think maybe we met at French Summer Camp or Brownies or maybe just randomly on the playground...My first two memories of Fiona are vague - I don't know which one came first. One is of talking to her on the playground and the other is of a Brownie meeting where all three groups got together to meet (we were in different groups). In both memories, I feel like I must have known her for a while. I definitely met Fiona sometime in the fall of Grade Two. Only, I was still in Grade One. I changed schools that year so that I could go into French Immersion, but it meant I was two years behind my classmates. Seven is an okay age to acquire a new language, so the school's solution was to put me back in Grade One for part of the year and then after Christmas move me to Grade Two. Fiona was most certainly in my Grade Two class. Because Grade One was a portable and Grade Two was in the school and the portable had hooks, but the school had lockers and lockers were given out at the beginning of the year and there were never quite enough to go around anyway, I had to share a locker and I am almost positive I shared with Fiona. And if we didn't share, well, my locker was really close to hers.

Blah blah blah...it's Fiona's birthday and that up there became about me somehow.

So, Grade Two was the cementing of our friendship and even though sometimes we fought, sometimes we didn't like each other, sometimes one (or both) of us would wish the other would just GO AWAY, somehow we stayed friends through elementary school, Guides, hormones, high school, Pathfinders, sleepovers, Bronze/Silver/Gold Camps for Canada Cords, my disappearance to boarding school, and living together (!) for two years even though we said we'd never ever ever live together. I can safely say Fiona is one of my very best friends, we've shared secrets (important ones and ones that just seemed important at the time), she knows most, if not all of my secrets, she has seen me laugh so hard my face turned red and I couldn't stand up, she's seen me cry about important stuff and not so important stuff, she's seen the after effects of too much cat hair and not enough sleep (boy, I get crabby!), she's seen me and my sisters behave like evil siblings, she (and D-Man) became our honourary siblings even though they knew how we could behave, although we've since grown up and are nice to each other...anyway, I could go on and on and on and on when really, besides announcing to the world how great I think she is, I'm just really trying to say:

Happy Birthday Fifi!!!