Girls' Weekend

I'm getting ready for one of my favorite weekend of the year - my annual weekend with my girlfriends from college! We started getting together every MLK weekend in 2001 (or 2000 depending on who you ask and what you consider an "official" girls' weekend) and with one exception when two of us gave birth to a total of four children (note, I only pushed out one of those kids, so yes, my friend had triplets!) we haven't missed a year!

This weekend is nothing fancy. Most years we've met at someone's house, or a house belonging to someone in the family. A couple of years we returned to the scene of the crime in State College, PA and relived our glory days at PSU. This year we rented a house near a lake a small ski resort, which for us is kind of extravagant.

We laugh a lot, we cry always, we share memories of the past and talk about our futures. We admit things we don't admit anywhere else. We forgive. We contemplate how things turned out like they did, so much different than any of us expected as we walked across the stage with our diplomas in 1998, and we accept that even though we have changed, we're still the same.

I have lived in four cities since graduating from college, five if you count the brief stint I did back at my parents' house, and while I've found some wonderful friends in each of them, I'll never replace these girls. And I never want to.