Dear Reader,
Congratulations to book club reader, Alice Sarnowski, this year’s 3rd Place Winner, in my annual Write a DearReader Contest.
Alice has entered the Write a DearReader contest before, and last year her entry was awarded an Honorable Mention. In this year's winning entry, “Bestie” Alice shares a magical moment with her best friend…
Violets Be Blue
Best friends–I pride myself on being a good friend. I met my best friend Jody in primary school. We bonded by height as the tallest girls in our class. Our teachers organized a buddy system for class outings to keep track of us and my height buddy became my companion for all of my life's highs and lows.
Height was not all we shared. We loved animals and dolls and sports and our favorite color was blue. We dressed in the same styles and pretended to be twins and spent all our time together.
The best part of spending time at Jody's house was the amount of time her parents spent with us. As an only child Jody was the satellite that her parents rotated around. All the trips were planned around her interests and as I was her best friend I was treated as a treasure and was quickly absorbed into the fibers of their life, accompanying the family on all their family events.
With all these privileges one would assume we would be pampered but we remained balanced and loving companions. Jody's father was an administrator of a nursing care facility and we gladly spent a lot of our free time helping and assisting the residents with parties and song fests and reading poetry. We had alternate personalities to help the dementia patients remember us. Jody dressed in red and called herself Rose and I dressed in blue and called myself Violet.
Wonderful years passed and my best friend and I remained close during college, careers and marriages. We lived in the same town, attended the same church and volunteered at a local shelter. And then our world was shaken when Jody's mother died in a car accident. The death of our mentor and guide was devastating to us.
As a way to distract us we planned a birthday party at a park for Jody's daughter's sixth birthday. It was a marvelous day with much fun and laughter. As the children were playing Jody and I packed up all the presents and cleaned up the carnage that comes from serving a lunch for 20.
We were pleasantly surprised to hear birdsong from a cardinal. Jody's mother loved cardinals and her house was peppered with this bird on towels and cards and pictures. It was comforting to think that somehow her mother was sending us a message through nature that she was still watching over us.
What we saw next caught us by surprise. On one of the picnic tables sat a cardinal with a single red rose and a sprig of violet in its beak. Both Jody and I had tears in our eyes and held hands in shock. It had been years since we had gone by Violet and Rose in our young years of galloping through the halls of a nursing home bringing joy and laughter to the elderly.
What Jody didn't know until that day was that I had been struggling with making a career move that involved a big monetary challenge to my savings and lifestyle. With this one vision it became clear to me that I should go forward with my plans to start my own small business named Violets Be Blue, all because of a loving woman who enveloped me into her family and inspired me to give back to the world all the gifts I learned from a woman who loved me unconditionally and shared the best things this life had to offer.
– Alice Sarnowski, Third Place, 2022 Write a DearReader Contest
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
* This month's Penguin Classics is Metamorphosis by Ovid, a sensuous and witty poem in an accessible translation by David Raeburn. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win.
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