Old, Gold Friends

Growing up, I always wanted a bosom friendship like Anne Shirley and Diana Barry shared. I was blessed with a twin sister--a topic worthy of not just a blog post but an entire book. Probably a series!--but I guess I was attracted to the allure of finding a female kindred spirit that didn't happen to come from the same parents and share the same uterus as I did. I made a few good friends in high school and never lacked for people to run around with, but especially my senior year I felt lonely a lot. I'd made some really great friends over the summer at Lutheran Summer Music the prior summer, and those four girls gave me a wonderful blessing of deep, if quickly made, friendship. I hoped I found a hint of that bond in college.

Well, God was gracious, and He gave me a dear, wonderful friend in Monica, who was my roommate throughout college, excepting the year I studied abroad and she took a turn as an RA. To this day she and I are great friends, and words can't express how thankful I am for her. Funnily enough, she grew up in the same area as Papa, and they attended the same Lutheran grade school, though not at the same time. (I've learned that I really like blond, stoically Lutheran, super awesome Milwaukee-area-bred people. Call me a wannabe-Wisconsinite.) Anyway, Monica and I made friends in other contexts at school, and through a long and circuitous route we befriended and were friended by a group of terrific girls. Our senior year we all tried to live together in a ramshackle house just a block from campus, but the house could hold six, and we were seven. So Monica and I roomed together in an apartment with two other awesome ladies and popped over to the Green House throughout the year to hang out and visit.

Fast-forward eight years to now. Some of us have married; some of us have traveled; some of us have lived rural and some of us have lived urban. All of us have completed master's degrees; all of us are still trying to live the lives that God has set before us in the ways He would see fit. We've never been together again, all of us, since graduation, until late in May. After kicking around a 30th-birthday-year get-together for almost a year, we finally settled on having a reunion here over Memorial Day weekend.

I wish I could adequately express how logistically perfect everyone's travel, job schedules, and life events generally had to coalesce to make this happen. Suffice it to say that we managed to get all of us together in rural Minnesota (which was amazing by itself!), when just weeks earlier three--I think--of us had been overseas (China, France, Switzerland/England) and Monica and I were between babies (C nearly six months old, Monica's babe about a month from birth). On paper, we didn't do much: ate a LOT, took walks, visited the Monument, went to church together. It was perfect. We laughed a lot and cried a lot and didn't stop talking for forty-eight hours (with a few winks for sleep in there). And I can say that just thinking about those precious days together make my eyes water and my heart swell. These women are incredible. We have our differences, as everyone does, but we support each other and love each other. "Keep the old," the saying goes about friends. They are gold. They are priceless, and their friendship is priceless.

I could go on and on about this, but I'll leave with this: thank you, thank you to Monica, Julie, Gretchen, Sarah M., Katie, and Sarah S.--to all the Green House girls. You are old, gold friends--bosom sister-friends!--and I pray we will have many, many other reunions as we age.

Jules brought some decorations!

Together after church. So incredibly special.