In some ways it is the 1970s all over again.  Not the fashions, which is a blessing, nor the home furnishings, also a blessing. But in other, sweeter ways, it is as if my friends and I never left high school.  Or rather, it is as if we are still in high school, but we are nicer now, kinder.  How we might have been then, but without the angst and hormones, the striving and insecurities. 

Our complexions have cleared up but there are other issues to take the place of bad skin. Well, actually, it is still bad skin.  Crepe and wrinkles and those pesky annual trips to the dermatologist.  Back in the day it was tetracycline and sulfury creams.  Now, it is cryotherapy and biopsies, as we pay for all that sunbathing with baby oil.  But still.  The same.

In the past month I have seen or been with most of my girls on the regular.  One pal who has moved away was in town for a quick forty-eight hours, but enough time for a lunch date, and Nancy and Tony drove down from Louisville early so they could join us, ahead of a football game in Bowling Green.  They all came over to my house,  clamored up the stepladder to my new addition to offer congratulations and suggestions. 

This past weekend it was “Voices of Elmwood” and a bunch of us huddled together on the wagon, our systems shocked by the first cold evening, and we thumped along cracking wise like we always have.  But quietly, not in the obnoxious way of our youth.  We were a model audience, with only a whispered bon mot now and then.  

Nancy was in town for just the afternoon because her husband, Tony, and Drew, their son, were playing golf with Woody.  She hung out with me and Ruth Ann and we had lunch and a tour of Ruth Ann’s new home.  And then, Ruth Ann and the girls and I went to dinner a few hours later as we waited for our Elmwood tour to start.  We all ended up back at Ruth Ann’s for dessert. 

In this way we haven’t changed.  We travel on our stomachs, we make sure we pace ourselves but we never miss a meal, ever. 

It seemed so easy.  I didn’t mind Nancy seeing the mess I have created in my house as I sat overwhelmed and anxious for the new work to be completed.  We looked at sofas on line, we discussed the attributes of loose back cushions and those attached, we gagged at some of the colors on offer. 

  We talked about Julie and her recent trip down the Danube.  I had sent her some of my best Prague and Budapest tips before she left.  Then, because now it was on my mind, I sent her more as things occurred to me after she departed.  In this way, I was hanging out with her while she was hanging out with her husband and their friends floating along in Europe.  Another childhood connection made and maintained. 

I can take little credit for our group getting together.  Because that is what it is, a coming back together, not that we have stayed together.  Sure, we have kept up with births and deaths and other big events over the years, but now it seems we are in each other’s lives again.  Margaret decided we needed to get away for a weekend eight years ago, and we so we have continued it.  And it is a wonderful feeling. 

We are far-flung, some of us, but we burn up the WhatsApp chat, and it seems we have relearned each other, but so much easier this time around, helped by a shorthand decades old. 

We used to swap job news, kid news, and complain about how exhausted we were on those rare times we might catch up, usually in Owensboro and around some holiday or another. Meals taken in a McDonald’s with a Play Place, a stop between family obligations on those quick trips home to see parents. Now, we drive two hours just for lunch, and think nothing of it. Now we talk about our health, of course, but also books, and what seems to occupy everyone–what to stream next on Netflix, or AppleTV. 

All weekend I had this warm little place inside, nothing too giddy, but nice, and I thought it must be the weather.  Now I think it was this:  fall, yes, but fall with friends.