What is friendship? I can tell you this my group—my girls—were found in an unexpected place, in an unexpected way, in an unexpected time. We are part of an all-girls small rural vet clinic. We fight like sisters sometimes (OK a lot of the time), are friends, and have become family. 

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The saying goes that coworkers sometimes know us better than our own families. We spend every day together, we know how hard and challenging a day in our lives are because we’ve lived it too, and in our field, we literally have each other’s backs when it comes to aggressive dogs or feral cats.

I’ve never seen a more unique, diverse, funny group of girls, and I love them all. 

The pandemic has torn a lot of people apart—destroyed, hardened, and hurt many things—but for us, it has brought us closer together. Our team has bonded as we faced this head-on, together, and has made us nothing but stronger. 

As a group, we’ve faced everything—divorce, miscarriages, death, birth, health problems, and COVID.

We’ve seen the good and the bad, and it’s the harder moments of life, seen and shared, that define true friendship. 

Brunches, lunches, girls’ nights, shoulders to cry on, long drives, long hikes, ice cream, and Doritos, just a listening ear and a hug are where support and love is found.

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I hope, reader, that you are as lucky as I am to have camaraderie, and if not, I hope one day you will. One day we may not be all together, but our friendship will live on, and so will our laughter and all the four-legged lives we’ve touched together as a team.