Honestly, Sandie

The Friend Who Taught Me What to Look For | Day 3

Before I met this friend, agates were just rocks.

I had probably walked past hundreds of them without ever noticing. Then one day she picked one up and showed me what I was looking at. We were standing along the Columbia River, surrounded by thousands of ordinary stones, and somehow she spotted the one that mattered. She held it up to the light and suddenly I could see it. The color. The bands. The glow around the edges. After that, I started finding them everywhere. The river hadn’t changed. I had. Someone taught me what to look for.

That’s been one of her gifts from the very beginning.

I met her shortly after moving to Washington. We were standing back-to-back during some strange MOPS icebreaker where we were supposed to answer questions and get to know each other. I remember walking into those meetings feeling like everyone else had life figured out. I thought I was surrounded by women who knew exactly what they were doing while I was still trying to find my footing in a new state, raising young kids and building a life from scratch. Then I started hearing real stories. Her story was one of the first. Within minutes I realized nobody in that room was perfect. We were all carrying something. We were all surviving something. We were all trying to figure it out as we went. That realization changed everything because it transformed a room full of strangers into a room full of friends.

She’s the kind of person whose presence fills a room before she ever says a word. You know when she’s arrived. Then comes the laugh. If you’ve ever heard it, you know exactly what I mean. It’s impossible to miss. It’s the kind of laugh that makes other people laugh whether they know the joke or not. She has always carried that combination of boldness and joy. She says what she thinks. She stands up for herself. She stands up for other people. She doesn’t spend her life waiting for permission to exist. That’s one of the reasons people are drawn to her.

One of my favorite things about her is that she has always known how to create adventure in ordinary seasons. When our lives revolved around toddlers, snacks, diapers, school pickups, and survival mode, she refused to let motherhood become small. She was always finding something to do. A park. A playdate. A road trip. A random hillside where somebody claimed agates could be found. I still laugh thinking about the Costco trips with what felt like an entire village of children between us. Most people would have described those years as chaos. She found the fun in them. She has always had a way of reminding people that life is happening right now, not someday when things calm down.

Columbia Basin agates aren’t diamonds. They aren’t flashy. Most people would walk right past one without recognizing what they’re seeing. The people who know what they’re looking at understand their value immediately. They know those layers were formed over time. They know those bands tell a story. They know pressure had something to do with the finished product.

That’s why this stone reminds me of her.

I’ve watched people misunderstand her. I’ve watched people tell stories about her that never matched the woman standing in front of me. I’ve watched her make difficult decisions. I’ve watched her leave places that no longer fit. I’ve watched her survive heartbreak, survive judgment, survive divorce, and survive becoming the villain in stories she didn’t write. Through all of it, she kept moving forward. She kept growing. She kept becoming more herself. Pressure didn’t destroy her. Pressure revealed her.

One of the most important things she taught me is that we don’t get to decide someone else’s journey. We don’t get to dissect every choice they make and appoint ourselves the expert on their life. We are responsible for our own path. Our own healing. Our own decisions. That lesson has become more valuable to me with every passing year. The older I get, the less interested I am in judging how someone survived and the more interested I am in honoring the fact that they did.

When I think about friendship, I think about consistency. I think about the people who remain. The people who can go months without a phone call, a year without seeing each other, and somehow pick up exactly where they left off. The people whose place in your life doesn’t depend on proximity or frequency. It depends on foundation.

She’s one of those people.

I’ll never walk the banks of the Columbia River without thinking of her. I’ll never hold an agate up to the light without seeing her face. Sixteen years later, what we’ve built feels exactly like the stone that represents her: solid, weathered, shaped by pressure, and still here.

She’s not the diamond.

She’s the rock.

And I’ve trusted that rock for sixteen years.

Music has always helped me put words around things I struggle to explain, and for this one, the song is Carry On by Fun. Not because life has been easy. Not because every chapter has worked out the way we thought it would. Because some people teach you what resilience looks like. They get knocked down and get back up. They lose things and rebuild. They get misunderstood and keep showing up anyway. They carry on. Sixteen years later, when I think about agates, I think about pressure, layers, endurance, and beauty that wasn’t obvious to everyone at first glance. When I think about this friend, I think about all those same things. Carry on, my friend. You’ve been doing it all along.