P365 Day 190: Blast from the past (plus a super-rare pic of teen Kate with no makeup or hair color)

This collage of old Carrie 'n' Kate pics sits on the dresser in Carrie's guest room -- which is beautiful, by the way. I know it's not ideal to take P365 snapshots of picture collages (cheating!!!), but I'll be damned if I'm going to take out each one of those photos and shoot them separately.

The top left photo -- definitely my favorite -- was taken in 1989 at my 9th birthday party. The bottom right one is of Carrie and me riding a horse, probably in 1991 or 1992. I have absolutely no memory of that event. Either I've blocked it out or the meds have claimed yet another childhood memory. In any case, the picture exists, and it looks like we're having (some? a little?) fun.

Carrie and I were inseparable during our formative years. We met in the mid '80s and were best friends until she moved to Florida with her family in 1997, right after she graduated from high school. (For the record, that was also the summer I met Paul.) But for most of our teen years, she and I spent a lot of time at the now-defunct Espresso Etc., a pre-Starbucks mom-and-pop coffeehouse. We also had sleepovers every weekend, often put off our flute lessons -- I'm not sure any of my blog readers even realize I was a flautist in a past life -- played a lot of pinball and wrote tons of super-snarky songs that we could probably still sing nearly two decades later.

We even had a New Year's Eve tradition of going out for pie at midnight with our families. Pie. At midnight. Instead of fireworks. Pie.

But perhaps the funniest memories (and a whole different set of much less flattering photos) came from the summers we spent on the road for church youth trips. We went everywhere -- from Florida to Kansas to Texas to D.C. (the last being something else I've completely blocked out but for which there's photographic proof -- on Facebook, no less). She and I have bunked in lodges where roaches fell from the ceiling. We've also been housed in camp dormitories and kind people's homes -- once without running water. (Ugh. And we'd had a rough day and really needed showers, too.) I kind of wish blogging had existed in the early to mid '90s because I'd have had a lot of fodder.

Man, those pics bring back a lot of memories. Here's one more, taken on a road trip circa 1994-95:


No fireworks. Just pie. Pie.