A gift you give yourself

I have friends coming to visit over the weekend (so this blog is being scheduled since I can't be at the keyboard). This is the first visit of friends since we moved to our new house, and I am so looking forward to their arrival.

I think friendships like this are a girl thing. The 2 women visiting us are a couple I met in the mid-90s, when I worked at a company with one of the women. Over the years I got to know her well and her partner, and we, along with 7 other women, met regularly for lunch or dinner. Through good times and bad, we've been friends. People have had heart attacks, cancer, deaths, divorce, job upheavals, kid upheavals and because we don't get together often, we usually get the summary of what happened.

I think it's important to stay connected to people. I don't know many men who have such a robust circle of friends as I do, and I do think of them as "circles" -- the writing friends, the work friends, the hometown friends, the family friends. None of them intersect in classic Venn diagram fashion, but they are all out there and all related to me through amazing ties of shared experiences.

As I said, I used to get together with a regular group at least every other week. One time my husband said, "You're meeting the Red Shoe Gang again? [We always wore red shoes when we got together] You just met them a month ago."

I said, "Yeah, but Emily has a teenager and Janet started a new job and Nancee has cancer and Laraine just got divorced. A lot can happen in 2 weeks."

I've known these women for 20 years and counting (and some of them, my hometown friends, I've known for 50 years and counting!)

Here's to many, many more decades of fun and frivolity together!