Melissa's special necklace, made with beads from her circle of friends.

My favorite piece of jewelry looks like child's play. It is a mismatched collection of seemingly unrelated beads strung on craft cord and tied in a knot on the back. The beads range from tiny to large, obviously homemade to finely crafted, and arranged in an order that defies logic. This necklace is my connection to the world. I live in a fairly isolated rural area of western Tennessee, having moved here four years ago after 16 years in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a beautiful part of the country, but I have yet to connect to the people here. In response to intense loneliness, I turned to the computer and email. I'm on various email discussion groups, most having to do with my dual career as a lactation consultant and freelance writer. I've kept up old friendships from Georgia by email, and met many other wonderful people online.

A couple of years ago, I joined an email list of women who share a common bond in the way we chose to raise our children, though most of us are well beyond the "diaper" stage.

The group started out with just a handful of women and grew fairly rapidly o more than 40 women around the world. We range in age from 40 to 70, and among us have hundreds of years of experience as parents. Our collective children number well over 100.

From the very start, it became obvious that this was a special group who felt comfortable sharing very personal feelings and experiences. We wanted to keep the group a safe place to share, so early on we decided to close the group once we reached around 50 members.

We also promised each other that we wouldn't share anything from the group with others outside the group--and spent the time necessary to be sure we all understood what that meant.

In the beginning, most of the discussion centered around things we had in common. As we learned more about each other, and discovered that the group was indeed a haven for expressing concerns about family and friends, the focus broadened considerably.

This is a group of highly opinionated women, yet it's the most open-minded, tolerant group in which I've ever had the pleasure of participating. We come from different religious beliefs, customs, and lifestyles, and share these freely.

We've shared in the joy of birth announcements, graduations, major career changes, "cute kid" stories. And we've shared the heartache of the death of family members, serious illness, marital problems, and our children's struggles. Various members have even acted as "surrogate" moms when other list members' children have been stranded in unfamiliar territory.

In some ways, I know these women better than I know my own family, and yet up until last summer, there was something missing. Most of us had never met in person. And like many email friendships, we longed for the chance to meet and put faces to the names on our list.

Our opportunity to do so came in the form of an international parenting conference, held in Washington, DC. Many of us had planned to attend, and with the possibility of a meeting of the email group, more made plans to attend.

One of our members came up with a lovely idea for this much anticipated meeting of email friends. She suggested we contribute beads for a friendship necklace. Each of us was to supply the group with enough beads for each of us to have one from every other member.

We encouraged bead selection based on something meaningful to the giver, and we asked for bead descriptions, and why the beads were selected. We placed no cost restrictions, and made it clear that having the bead from each member was far more important than its price or construction.

Several members made their beads from clay, wood, or special jewelry-making materials. Others purchased unique-to-their-area beads of various shapes and sizes. We have tiny ostrich shell beads from Africa, and beads rolled from pages of our organization's magazine.

We have beads that change color in the sunlight and wooden beads handmade from cedar whose smell is reminiscent of hope chests. Each of us thought long and hard about what bead choice would best represent us to the group--how we feel about the group, where we are from, our hobbies, our dreams for the future.

One member offered to coordinate the bead collection and distribution and took care of supplying each of us with a bag of the shared beads and a string to put them on. Even the people who could not make it to the conference sent beads so the necklaces would be complete.

Melissa Vickers

It was wonderful meeting these fine women I've come to know so well over the last couple of years. We've laughed and cried and shared our innermost thoughts, mapped out our futures, shared our customs and traditions.