Greensboro NC to Greensboro GA

This weekend I went to Greensboro GA with four of my friends from Greensboro NC.  To look at the picture of the five of us, taken by a kind boater, you would probably see five sixty-year-old women.  But when I see the picture, I picture us when we were younger, forming ourselves, being formed by our parents and our experiences.

Out of ten parents, only one of us has a parent left.  One girl is divorced.  One girl is divorced and remarried.  We have children and grandchildren.  None of us has settled far from home; all live in the southeast.  Some have been hit by tragedy.  In short, a typical group of women.

We have so many memories of our time together.  I've known one of the girls since the fourth grade, the others since junior high.  When we gather for these brief weekends, there doesn't seem to be enough time to remember it all; we skim the surface of some of our past while digging deeply into other parts.  We feel free to reveal the truths of our home lives now that our parents are gone.  We don't have to keep secrets any more.  It's freeing!  It's healing.  It is safe and enveloping.

It's morbid, I know, but I've lost a couple of friends in the past year or so, and I can't help thinking that one year we'll get together and one of us will be missing.  I stare into each face on the porch in Greensboro GA, seeing the girl I knew in Greensboro NC, and can't bear to think of it.  Before we say good night on our last night together, we talk about next year, where we'll go, who to invite into our circle of friends from the past, making a future with all of us in it so we don't say 'good-bye,' just 'see you next year.'