It's called busy work, though I've never completely understood why. Busy work supposedly let's our hands do the work, disengaged from our brains. We're just busy. Not engaged. Or, at least that's how I understand it. And, so, it was busy work that I was doing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing that last pot, trying to be delicate and aggressive at the same time ... getting that perfect balance of pressure to remove the baked on goop while preserving that valuable finish on the surface of the pan, when she came to mind. That friend of mine with the story that still makes me chuckle years later.

Her story is that, while a teenager at home alone, she literally scrubbed the teflon finish right off her mom's electric skillet. It was the dickens of a job, she'd say. The elbow grease and commitment to get the last of that "mess" off that skillet was Herculean. But, by golly, she'd done it.

That story engaged my disengaged brain and set me on a course of thinking that when I remember friends, I remember stories. I can identify friends by a single story that makes me laugh, builds me up in encouragement, or causes me to see life differently than before.

I remember my first Tennessee friend. From my new front yard after moving across the country, literally, from Oregon when I was five years old and scared for friends, I looked across the road  and saw her leaning up against the corner of her house. She was six years old and wearing a dress up bridal gown and veil. And she was looking back across the road at me, who might have even been wearing a glittery dress up prom dress. My heart leapt in assurance of friendship!

There's the friend who flew to Houston, Texas to help move me and my Suburban back home to Alabama after a summer at MD Anderson Cancer Center there. In response to my attempts to reimburse her for the flight she'd made to Houston, she'd said, "Well, you can pay me back if you want. But, be warned, I'm going to change that money into quarters and dump it on your front lawn." Enough said.

I have laughed so hard with another friend that we've thought we really might have "busted" the proverbial gut and might have to make a run to the emergency room. I also think of her every time I peel cucumbers or carrots, picturing her graceful stance at the cutting board, carefully and deliberately preparing salad to share with visitors. But in that gracious and abundant offering of salad there was a dash of hilarity when once it was asked if Godzilla would be joining us for salad.

There's the group of four, who making our way through the dim, vast tunnels of Gibraltar came to be known as The Unit. We've been stranded on a train in France after national news making catastrophic train failure. We've found ourselves not speaking to each other when, during an episode in our relationship lovingly referred to as "The Madrid Moment," we'd found ourselves on the wrong train in Madrid on the infamous seventh day of travel together ... the day all travelers grow to hate their travel companions no matter how much love is there. Y'all, we know who we are.

When I say "we gave our dog away at a Strawberry Plains gas station," there are new friends who know the rest of the miraculous story. Elton John sing-alongs around the piano in the 1970"s? You definitely know who you are! And, a forever sister despite divorce binds us as Heart Sisters with a saga all our own.

I revisit these stories as often as I revisit these friends. These stories, all our stories, are the threads that stitch us together. We've got to tell our stories, then retell them again to savor and set in a firm foundation of friendship.  Because of that revisiting, I can say with accuracy that these friends know who they are to me. If they don't, I've got some visiting to do. You and yours, too.