I moved back to the east coast recently, to be near my family again. The cool thing about that is I get to spend time on the lake where I spent summers growing up. I have friends here that I’ve known for 40 years.
I think we all go through that momentary shock when we can say we’ve done anything for 40 years. How did I get to be so old?
The shared history is fun. Here’s my friend Allison:
We go back to when Allison was five and I was six. We were neighbors and we did everything together in the summer; we made clam soup and built dock forts and blanket forts and pine needle forts. We wrote “drop dead” plays and produced them for the neighborhood. I’m sure you’re wondering what a drop dead play is. It’s a play where the only requirement for the script is that all the characters drop dead at the end.
Everything was great until we burnt Allison’s house down in the middle of the night. No really, we did. We didn’t do it on purpose, but our summer cottage caught fire and the fire spread to the houses on either side. After that, Allison’s parents decided that they didn’t want to live next to us anymore, so they moved down the beach and built a new house.
The good news is that Allison and I are still friends and she didn’t get mad at me about the house. In fact, now I have my own bedroom at her new house. Here’s what our dogs do at Allison’s house:
It doesn’t look like they’re having fun, but really they are. They just wish Allison and I would stop reminiscing about the past and take them for a hike.
The thing about moving back home is that people really know who you are. That can be good, and that can be bad. On the good side you don’t have to work very hard to feel connected, to have a sense of community. On the bad side sometimes your friends bring up things you really would rather not remember. But I’ll take the good with the bad.
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