i promise you i’m just a spring chicken

Saturday night I sat around a table with precious friends I’ve known for 25 years.  GOODNESS GRACIOUS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.  How can I possibly have been cognizant enough of my surroundings for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS in order to maintain relationships for that long?  Astounding, really.  I feel young enough–and aware of the world only long enough–to have my longest-lasting friendships maybe be seven years old, ten years tops.  But here I am, 32, and I remember Joanna walking me to wash my thumb after stabbing it with a push pin in preschool.  (Side question: why in the world were three year olds left alone with push pins?)  Which means I’ve known her closer to thirty years.  Boy howdy.  Aren’t only old biddies supposed to say “boy howdy” and that they’ve known their friends for thirty years as they lean on their walkers and tell you about the days before indoor plumbing?  Because I am not an old biddy.

Anyway, Saturday night I sat around a table with precious friends I’ve known for 25 years.  And I only get to see these girls once in a while because their husbands whom I think are swell, I really do, took them far away from me.  For that I shake my fists at them.  My friends went to college then moved to fun places and found men in these far-off locales, only to marry them and stay hours away from me.  It’s maddening.  I’ll see each of them individually every year or two but we were all together for the first time in three-and-a-half years.  It had been too long.

As we sat around and shared stories about husbands and kids and in-laws, I fell in girl-love with my friends all over again.  Because they’re lovely women that I knew as lovely children and I’m so thankful that I get to be part of their lives even now.

Smartly, I brought my camera this time.  About a month ago I got to see my dear friend Amy but since we talked nonstop at dinner I never got a picture.  I did not make that mistake this time.  Here are my lovely, lovely friends, as well as two girls I didn’t know as a child but adore now just the same:

Me and some lovely ladies.

From left to right:

•  Joanna–The calm one who walked a crying three-year-old me to the bathroom at church right after I pricked my thumb.  In college I went to visit her in Texas where I found we had the same shower curtain and curling iron, which was no surprise because we’d show up to mission trips with identical outfits packed.  Great minds, great decorating and great hair.  With those traits of course I had her in my wedding.
• Kim–As crazy college-students we (and two other girls, one of them being her sister Gina) took a camping trip to Colorado and played silly LOUD games as the poor campers around us slept.  As an adult she helped me choose my cloth diapers.  Now she’s a smarty-pants doctor.  She was always a smarty-pants, she just added the “doctor” in the last few years.
• Amy–She joined our youth group in sixth grade and got to go on the Sturgis mission trip while the rest of us–WHO WERE THE SAME AGE AS HER–were deemed too young to attend.  The unfairness!  Then at Rockcleft (our yearly youth group camp in Colorado) we all decided she was okay.  Now she’s part of the Cool Kids Scene in Nashville, getting married in September, and will forever reside far away from me.  Not that I’m bitter.
• Traci–Friend of Amy.  I met her at Girls’ State in 1995 (I think?).  We sought each other out because Amy told us about the other friendly face who would be there.  She’s still a friendly face when I get to see her.
• Me!  With blonde hair!
• Gina–Oh, Gina.  She was a year older than me (read: too cool for me) so we didn’t become close friends until middle school.  Then we lived together in college and have lots and lots of blackmail material on each other; luckily we’re both nice girls and it will never be used.  Her husband keeps her in Kansas City but could bond with my husband over comic books if they’d only move here.
• Alisha–Friend of Amy.  And apparently my brother-in-law has worked with her husband, the public relations world being small a relatively small one.  This girl will make you laugh your face off with her stories.