KRISTIE MYERS

You always remember your first friends. The one you met with your brave face on the first day of kindergarten....When the road between your parent’s home and a dormitory became a

reality....Not the first person you saw, but the one whose face met yours and  the angst fell away.

Moving to Dawson County in 2000, LeeAnn Harter was my first friend.

Our Children, in middle school, pledged their undying affection for about...ummm...

6 weeks. This short lived love affair resulted in 7 years of constant bickering. But the seed was planted between two mothers. Ours is a relationship, that like most, has ebbed and flowed. Learn from reading this story that 2nd chances are a gift.

A few months ago, LeeAnn and I shared a sleeper car aboard the #20 Cresent, an Amtrak train headed to NYC from Gainesville,Georgia when I asked if she would let me tell her story…..

You see, LeeAnn is a “Behind the Scenes Gal.” Private almost to a fault, her missions are served with a quiet, selfless purpose. A purpose grown of a history. A history she trusted me to share.

Growing up hard and poor in Memphis LeeAnn bounced around foster and children’s homes.

As hard as it is to believe, believe this reader...there are parents that desert their children.

Beautiful, gifted children that like all of us, just want to be loved. Because “it would be best” LeeAnn found herself in Dillon, South Carolina....with a family that was supposed to be kind to a young girl. There are traumas in youth that can make you or break you.

In the darkness of those days a lifetime of empathy was seeded.

When she was 15, Dr Lewis Reese and his wife Myrna heard her story. In this simple willingness to listen, LeeAnn found her forever home. A gifted artist, LeeAnn can often be found in the studio of the home she shares with her husband of almost 40 years, Tom. They are proud parents to sons Rhys and Thomas. To visit LeeAnn is to visit a  land of gentleness. If “Fung-Schway”  was Southern, it would be the Harter Home. LeeAnn’s experiences birthed in her a generosity for the least of Dawson County and she goes about her mission with no fanfare or self promotion. A trained dental assistant , LeeAnn regularly volunteers those skills to the Good Shepherd’s Dental Clinic.

I thought it would be easiest to write about my friend as I know her so well. Truth is it was much harder. So few words to share the layers of my first friend. Just know that on many days, in many ways, LeeAnn is buying dog food and paying electric bills and looking at teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in decades..

If you ask me? I say I get the Grand Prize for first friend pickin’.