Today, my friends for about 50 years are coming to brunch.
It's always comforting to have them around.
We met about 52 years ago as kindergarten students at Indian Hill School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Together we've traveled a lot of mileage together including grade school, high school, jobs, college, marriage, children, teaching, extended families, and more.
In those early days when we spent lots and lots of time together from ages ten to eighteen, we spent many an afternoon analyzing the world around around us. We were always trying to make sense of what was going on. We told a lot of stories too as we were all from big extended families and spent lots of time relaying the stories of our siblings, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles.
We hold a lot of similar values including family first, good friendships/relationships with our husbands, teaching well, and having some fun in life too.
We still spend time telling stories and problem solving when we get together. Today the stories and problems usually connect to our young adult children and our jobs as teachers. We also share a lot of ideas and encourage one another too.
Our parents are aging and some have already left us--so there's a bit of collective sadness over that.
Having lifelong friends is a great gift to all of us. There's been times when we've been closer and times when we drifted apart due to different settings, demanding jobs, and busy lives--but we hung in there and are still friends to my utter joy.
Yesterday someone passed around some of Steve Jobs' final sentiments--essentially the post pointed to spending time and energy on the areas of life that you truly value, the areas that will bring you the most grace and comfort as you move forward. Good friends definitely are on that list.
