Old friends

Two years have passed since the last get-together of the girlfriends (shown here absent Paula and with Suzi's daughter Katie joining us for breakfast). This year, we will be absent Nanell (front left) who is on Cape Cod, but we may have Patti's sister Jean to round out the group.

Yeah, we're getting on in years, some of us long since gone gray and others looking pretty much the same way they looked at Athens High School in the 1960s. But these women are still girls to me, each one unique and treasured. We can fall back and pick up the conversation where we left it two, five, or 25 years ago, with the kind of ease and acceptance only old friends can offer authentically.

I rejoice in my old friends, realizing that they are really a family to me. Time to not let old acquaintances be forgotten, time to renew our decades-long friendships, time to make new memories.

What we do doesn't really matter. It's the people we do it with. And these are, as Irene would say, my "peeps." It's amazing to me now to think that there was a time we considered ourselves unattractive, unpopular, un- just about everything. I'd say we all turned out, as Garrison Keilor would say, "above average."