Who is YOUR oldest friend?

Lyndsey Durst (it took me about one minute to think of her new last name), formerly Lyndsey Thomas is my oldest friend. She just turned 31 last week and I'll be 31 in a couple months. We've been friends since the summer before we went to Kindergarten, so I think we were 5 and that gives us 26 years of friendship.

Our friendship wasn't taken for granted, as we only lived close to each other until we were going into the fourth grade. That is when she moved to Clovis, CA with her family. Many kiddos that young would have lost touch, but not us. We were best friends, and we wrote letters religiously and every once in awhile our folks would let us call each other. After not seeing each other in person for five years, I won $101.50 in a radio station contest, which at the time was almost enough to buy a ticket to CA. I spent it all on that ticket and flew at age 13 to visit her in Clovis.

We were still as close and compatible as ever, and I really looked up to her because she'd been kissing boys for a couple of years and I was still running away from them. We had a great week together, and lots of tears were shed when it was time to return home.

We continued letter writing and added to the fun, mailing each other whole cassette tapes of one-sided conversations. When we were maybe 14 or so, her family moved to Moses Lake, WA only a couple hours from where I lived and we were able to see more of each other.

Her friendship was the most important to me through the high school years as she was one of my only friends who shared my religious beliefs. We were pretty regular with visits and phone calls increased, and we relied on each other through many petty boyfriend fights and other such adolescent drama. She experienced some fairly major health issues over a period of a year or more and it was something I remember really worrying about a lot, though she seemed to take it in stride.

After high school, we attended college together at Ricks College in Rexburg, ID and we were roommates. It was a great time for us as we got along flawlessly and enjoyed the freedoms of living away from home and experiencing college together. This was a time when I realized more than ever how much her friendship meant to me. Many people assumed we were sisters, or even twins. We shared all our clothes and gave little effort to keeping our room clean. We lived together for two years, before she transferred to Utah State and I transferred to BYU.

We both graduated the spring of 2001 and took any and all money and credit to EUROPE where we travelled for about two months. We were very compatible travelers, often skipping the museums for shopping or a suntan, when we spent a week in Nice, we really just ate, slept and sat at the beach, she may have read...we knew that if there was anything overly worthwhile to see in Nice, we could just google it when we got back home! We saw U2 in concert in Paris on our last night. We didn't have tickets, so we went to the trusty ATM and started withdrawing funds from any and all cards in our possession until we were completely out of money. We took all our money to the ticket scalpers and flew home the next day with big plans to work off our fabulous trip all over Spain and the south of France.

She was at my wedding four months later, and I was at hers 18 months after mine. We have managed to see each other even as she continued her education and a full-time career in ID and I took on the role of mother. We still get along effortlessly and we are still as ever, on the same page in most everything.

It is so nice to know that there is someone who knows you inside and out so effortlessly and with whom there is no time lapse or requirement for friendship maintenance. We have done many silly things together, we learned about S-E-X from the same neighbor informant when we were little, we both fell head over heels for the same boy when we were in kindergarten and our crush remained mutual until she moved, we always agreed that we could just share him, she coached me through seven long years of ups and downs and complete outs with my now husband, and continues to hear me out now that we are married, we got caught at a pizza buffet when we couldn't eat what we determined was our fair share, so we wrapped up a couple of pieces to take on the road, we once used nylons to tie the front doors shut on an entire apartment complex across the parking lot from our college pad, we obsessed over music together and would lay down on the floor of our room with sad songs on full blast and the lights out, we watched over two pet turtles, and subsisted for two full years on popcorn and butter spray.

I'm glad for my first "sister-friend" and for her solid friendship all these years. I miss you and I love you!