They were my first friends, and I think they will be my last. Two women who have been in my life since before I can really remember not knowing them, who were there at the very beginning and are, I hope, going to be there at the very end. I’ve written elsewhere in these pages about how few friends I have, and how friendship hasn’t always come easily to me. But these two have been the steady exception my whole life long. Two people who have loved me since we were small and never once let go.

They both came to me through the same neighborhood web that made my whole childhood, the one that started when a woman knocked on our door when I was three and became my mother’s best friend. One of them is that best friend’s daughter. Her mother literally came and collected me one day and walked me over to their house, and that was that, we were bound together, the next generation of a friendship our mothers were also building. The other came into my life through that same family’s extended branches, a relative who lived near her parents, and somehow we all funneled into the same elementary school and then, years later, the same high school. The neighborhood didn’t just give me a childhood. It handed me the two friends I’d keep for life. They could not be more different from each other, or from me.

One of them was brilliant from the start, a reader so voracious that even in first or second grade I understood I had better keep up. She was the English to my math, and she motivated me without even trying, just by being so sharp that I wanted to reach her level. She wanted to be a news reporter when we were kids, and whenever my dad had his video camera out she would leap in front of it and narrate the scene, setting it all up like a broadcast, telling the camera exactly what was going on. She grew up to be a highly successful executive who travels the world, a life about as different from mine as you can get, and I say that with no envy at all, just wonder at how far that bookish little girl went.

The other was the beautiful one, the popular one, the social one, and yet somehow she was mine, close to me all through the neighborhood years. I’d stop by her house on the way to elementary school, and later on the way to the bus in middle school. She’s creative and smart and business-minded, a wonderful stylist who became a realtor, and she’s getting married next year. About a decade ago she took a piece of art off the wall of her own salon and simply handed it to me. It is cemented to the wall over my bed now, the first thing above me every night, and it is probably my most prized possession. I am so proud of that piece of art, not for what it is but for who gave it to me and what it means, which is that someone I’ve loved my whole life took something off her own wall and put it into my hands. We’ve helped each other over the years, though if I’m honest they, and especially she, have helped me more than I’ve managed to help them. I tried to sort out some accounting trouble with her old bookkeeper. She held me up when I was going through my divorce. That’s how it’s gone, back and forth, for decades.

This past Christmas she came over for a baking day and the two of us made some of my mom’s cookie recipes together, my oldest friend in my kitchen, my late mother present in the ingredients, the whole long thread of it still being lived out in real time. I hope we do it again next year. I hope we do it for many years.

Both of them are wonderful mothers. Both of them were in my wedding, at my kids’ birthday parties, at my mother’s funeral. They have seen all of it, every chapter, the good and the unbearable, and they are still here even when life pulls the visits thin. They feel like family because in every way that actually matters, they are. I don’t have a lot of friends. I’ve said that clearly in these pages and I won’t pretend otherwise now. But I have these two, and I have had them since the beginning, and I believe I’ll have them until the end. First friends. Last friends. Not everyone gets that. I know I’m lucky to have it, and I don’t intend to ever take it for granted.