Girlfriends

Now is the time of my life that I miss my girlfriends the most.  I miss the sweetness that comes from spending time with someone who has known you your whole life...the good, the bad, and the ugly.  I miss the quietness that comes in the middle of the night when you just need to call your girlfriend for a good cry...over the guy who broke your heart or the one who didn't or for no reason at all.  I miss the hysterical laughter that comes with wine, coffee, chocolate, and everything in between while you watch movies, go to dinner, sit at the beach, swim topless in the pool (Cory, Katie, and Jen know what I'm talking about) while eating fruit salad when you're supposed to be at school.  I miss lazy days at the beach in a sun/sand coma lying next to each other....no words necessary...unless a guy in a banana hammock walks by.  I miss slumber parties with silly videotaped interviews and scary movies and junk food and later on beer (and pepsi).  I miss the uncomplicatedness of life that happens when you're with a girlfriend.

It was so easy in high school to spend time with your girlfriends.  You all lived in the same place, went to school together every day, hung out on the weekends and after school.  And then college came.  Everyone headed off in separate directions and separate lives and spending time with your girlfriends got a little more challenging.  Now instead of hopping in the car and driving 5 minutes up the road to pick up your bestie you might have to drive 5 hours up the road or hop on a plane.  Planning was required, but it made the reunions all the sweeter.  Separation only cemented the friendship you have and you started to gain a fragile understanding that friendship is precious and time is short.

Then college was over.  Now the hard work really begins.  Girlfriends moved and got married and had babies, or didn't.  New friends were made and those new friends were just as special and as valuable as the ones made in elementary school, high school, and college.  Life begins passing by at an alarmingly fast rate and due to jobs those weekend trips become harder and harder to plan and commit to.  Life interferes in friendships or it can if you let it.  Even finding time to make a catch up phone call can take an extraordinary amount of planning...when are you off work, when are the kids asleep, when is the husband not around so you can gossip about the men you married and how you love them and how they irritate you and how good your sex life is. 

But through all this craziness, through all this life one thing always remains...those girlfriends, your true true girlfriends....you can always make that middle of the night phone call, there is always wine to be drank and chocolate to be eaten, and tears to cry, and laughter.  That never changes.  And you can always tell a true girlfriend by how quickly time rewinds when you're together.  Suddenly you aren't in your 30's anymore with umpteen kids and mortgages and stress...you're 13 again or 18 or 25 and it's like no time has passed at all between when you last spoke much less saw each other. 

If I could have one wish this is what I would wish for...a weekend filled with girlfriends.  I'd gather up all my girlfriends, our kids, husbands, pets and we'd all spend the weekend at a huge lake house.   The girlfriends would sit in Adirondack chairs, drinking wine, and laughing as we watch our poor hapless husbands chase kids around the sand and water.  We'd let the kids and spouses sleep in while we ate eat carb heavy breakfasts and drank coffee with our feet tucked under us as we watched the morning mist rising on the lake.  We'd have serious talks and cry a little.  We'd grill out hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch and grill fresh caught fish for dinner.  There'd be swimming and lounging in the lake on those rafts you blow up yourself that cost 99 cents at the store.  There'd be lazy naps in hammocks and in blankets in the grass.  Kids would run barefoot all weekend while family dogs chased them.  There'd be lots of picture taking and lots of hugging.  Nightime would be early to bed for kids while the grown ups sat around the bon fire drinking wine and beer and eating smores...except we wouldn't be grown ups...we'd be 13 or 18 or 25 again.  And just for a weekend we could forget all the hard stuff that waited for us back home.  And everyone would leave at the end of the weekend walking a little taller, smiling a little broader, inhaling a little deeper, relaxed, refreshed, and with the kinds of memories that make you ready to come back and do it all again next year.  That is my idea of heaven of earth.