Wicket For Reagan

i posted this on facebook last week... last wednesday night i got word that one of my oldest and dearest friends passed away after a long fight with cancer. Reagan Steele was one of my neighbors when i was little... we played ewoks in the woods... ate grapes from the neighbor's fields and hung out a ton when we were little... as a wee boy i had a speech issue and generally my talking was a mile a minute and mostly gibberish... friends and family took to calling it "jonny talk"- reagan was one of those few folks who could actually understand what i was saying most of the time... i taught her about comics and star wars and unknowingly to her, back then, she was my first crush... but seeing as she was a girl and had cooties or something there was no way i was gonna tell her that... few years back we got back in touch over facebook and began calling each other every few weeks or so to just geek out over movies or comics... chat about my comics and my art. we kept trying to get together- whether it was at one of my comic shows or just a weekend visit... that never happened and i drove down with my mom and dad on friday to see her one last time and pay our respects... it took us an hour and a half to get to the church and then we waited in line for another hour and half, close to 2 hours, before we got thru and up to her mom and dad. i will never be able to look at my mom and dad's woods the same way ever again without a few tears as i remember the two little kids walking thru them with sticks in our hands and trying to find the best tree to climb to see if we can spot some ewoks. you will always be in my heart and thoughts reagan... no matter how dark those woods are there will always be a little lit spot in them where i'll see us playing away.