We Grew Up Together

Recently, I was laughing about something with my husband, and I realized with a sudden rush of giddy happiness that we still, after all these years, enjoy each other's company so, so much.  I realized (not for the first time, obviously) that we're totally in synch almost all the time: thinking similar thoughts at the same moment, caring about the same things, believing the same Truths, and finding the same things funny.  And it hit me how grateful I am that not only have I been doing life with this wonderful man--the most devoted husband and father a girl could ever dream to find--throughout my adult years (we'll celebrate our 46th anniversary in December), but I was lucky enough to know him when he was just a boy.  When we were 15, he became my best friend (as well as the only one I ever wanted to marry)...and nothing has changed in the 53 years since then.

We grew up together.  We met as freshmen in high school and started dating the summer between our freshman and sophomore years.  Married seven months after college graduation, at 22 (which today seems so much younger to me than it did back then), we started out with very little and built a life together that has surpassed any dreams I ever had for it.  Five sons, five daughters-in-law, 23 grandchildren with another on the way.  God is so good, dear readers.  So good.  I am humbled by His generosity!

I am well aware that it is not very common to start dating at 15, go away to colleges far apart from each other and spend four years in a long-distance relationship, and then make it to the finish line.  Or to the altar, that is. But we did.  We beat the odds, and I am so incredibly thankful that we did.  I didn't always feel confident that I would actually get my longed-for happily-ever-after ending, because high school sweethearts so seldom stay together for the long haul. But I did get it.  Deo gratias!

When we were seniors in college, both of our schools had big dances in the spring.  Notre Dame's senior ball was held in Chicago, in a very fancy downtown venue. As a surprise gift to my husband, who was the only one among his friends who'd gotten engaged before graduation, his best buddies took up a collection and a whole bunch of ND guys pitched in to send me a plane ticket from Boston to South Bend.  They also paid for the tickets to the ball and our hotel accommodations--and even rented an 80's classic powder-blue tux (you might have seen one like it in the movie Dumb and Dumber), using my husband's younger brother, an ND freshman who was almost the same size as he is, as a model.  It was just incredible.  One of the guys picked me up at the airport and drove me to campus.  I came up behind my unsuspecting fiancé at the Senior Bar (it was located in an old house and has an interesting history, but that’s a post for another day), and when I put my hand on his back and he turned toward me, the look on his face when he realized I was there was just priceless.  I'm so glad someone actually thought to take a picture (this was 1980, long before the constant photo-snapping iPhone days!).

A page from one of the many scrapbooks I kept. (Now I keep one here at the blog!)

My husband and I look like a couple of babies here.  (We were!)

The funny thing is, my college friends managed to execute a similar surprise for the spring ball at our school a few weeks later.  My best college friend later told me that after she learned about my husband’s friends’ scheme (which beat them to the punch), she was afraid it would look like they were just copying. But she said that they’d had their own surprise planned ever since we’d gotten engaged over Christmas break. So both sets of friends had come up with the same generous surprise gift for us, sending airplane tickets and all, without ever running it by each other. How lucky were we to have friends like those?!

Again, someone thought to snap a photo, just as my husband suddenly appeared in the dining hall when I was eating lunch. I couldn’t have been more flabbergasted!

I must have spent a lot of time finding and cutting sayings out of magazines for these scrapbooks!  LOL

Me: same dress that I wore for the ND ball.
Him: no powder-blue tux this time--just a nice-looking suit.

[Sigh....]  This is what happens when you get into your 60's.  You look back at when you were young and it feels like all you did was blink a few times and yikes, what happened?!  

We don't look much like the two starry-eyed, dewey-skinned creatures in those pictures anymore.  But we remember them, and how they felt; and we still feel the same way they did.  We really, really like each other.  I mean, you know, we like like each other, as the kids used to say.

We grew up together, and now we're growing old together.

Ch-ch-ch-changes, as the song goes!

 As long as we're together, it's all good.

Ace of Cakes

I was trying to come up with a catchy title for this post, and I realize that the one I chose sounds a tad braggadocious. Please excuse my apparent lack of humility here!  

But this is indeed a post about cakes.  And cakes are what I do, pretty much.

I went SO many years without one of theses mixers, until I had daughters-in-law 
who insisted that my kids should pool their resources and get me one.  
Best. Gift. Ever.

We have 14 grandchildren who live within striking distance here in VA, and I am the birthday cake-maker for all of them.  (The 7 who live in Wisconsin have a dad who makes them, and the 2 who live in Tennessee have a mom who does.)  My VA grandchildren tell me what kind of image they'd like on top, and I try to fulfill their birthday wishes! It's a tradition now, that I make their birthday cakes.  If it's just going to be for an intimate family celebration, I'll make a round layer cake or a 9x13" sheet cake.  But if it's for a party that will involve a lot of friends and other guests, I'll make a larger 14x18" sheet cake (which uses two cake mixes).  I do Baptism and First Holy Communion cakes sometimes, too; but my bread and butter is birthday cakes.

Or perhaps "my confectioner's sugar and butter is birthday cakes" would be a more apt way of putting it.

I am by no means a professional, but with as many cakes as I've made for my grandchildren (and my boys, too) since we moved to VA in 2017, I should be!

I always made and decorated birthday cakes for my sons when they were growing up.  They would put in their "order" for what image they wanted on the top, and I would do my best to make it happen.  (As an artist, I work mostly in frosting--LOL.)  I made some nice cakes for them back in the day, but I think I've gotten a lot better at cake decorating in recent years; partly because of the VOLUME of cakes that I've made, and partly because as a Grammy, I have a lot more time to spend on them than I did when I was a mom of young boys.

October is an extremely busy month for Grammy's Bakery.  Our oldest grandson celebrates his birthday early in the month (he just turned 12).  And then last night ended a three-day run of birthdays: one grandson turned 8, the next day his cousin turned 7, and yesterday his younger brother turned 6. For the two brothers, the cakes were just 9x13" ones, because our tradition with son #2's gang is that my husband and I usually go over for dinner with them and their immediate family, with a cake and present in hand. For the newly-minted 7-year-old granddaughter in the middle, I made the larger-sized sheet cake, because although we visited her on her real birthday, she'd had a big party with cousins and friends last weekend and the cake was for that.

Here are those last three cakes: we've got a Ja'Marr Chase, for our grandson who is obsessed with football in general and the Bengals in particular; a Princess Zelda, for a video-game loving granddaughter; and a Godzilla-themed one, for a grandson who requested it (after having monster truck-themed cakes for a few years in a row!). I kind of cheated with old Ja'Marr, because I was intimidated by making either a portrait of him or an action shot of him receiving a pass. But my grandson was thrilled with it, so all was well.

You might have noticed that I mentioned using mixes up there.  Yes, I do.  I've tried making a yellow cake from scratch, using a recipe from a Mrs. Fields cookbook, and it was good; but it wasn't as tasty as the ones I make from mixes (she admits sheepishly).  I start with a Betty Crocker yellow cake mix.  But where it says add water, I add milk. Where it says add oil, I add double the amount--but of butter, not oil.  And where it says add 3 eggs, I add 4.  It's a trick I found years ago online somewhere, for making a ho-hum cake from a box taste like a bakery cake.  (You're welcome!)

I always make my own buttercream frosting, with butter, confectioner's sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla. Then I make my own colored frostings, and although I do have some professional metal tips for cake decorating, I've never invested in a lot of gadgets that would make my hobby easier.  (Not sure why, I suppose I should.  But most of the cakes I make for my grandchildren have so many colors involved, I would need so many different tips and bags!)   So instead, I usually make my own decorating bags out of ziplocks, and I snip one corner.  If it's fine work I'm doing (like outlines), I make the snip very tiny. If I need to fill in a big space with a color, I snip off a little bit more. When I'm in the middle of making a cake, there are about 10 bowls of frosting going at once, spread out all over the place, and countless ziplock bags; there's confectioner's sugar dust everywhere; and my fingers are stained every color of the rainbow.  It's a glorious mess, I'll tell you.  And I could never do a cooking show, not with the way I trash just about every inch of my kitchen.

I showed my leftover decorating bags from this most recent string of cakes to my daugher-in-law Ginger last night. (I usually hang onto them until a cake has been delivered safely, just in case I need to do touch-ups or what-have-you.  And I still had the ones from the two cakes I'd made before the Godzilla cake for her little guy.)  When I did, she said I should blog about making cakes.  So this post is for you, Ginger. :)

The inspiration for this post.

If you're going to make colored frostings, the best food coloring is the Wilton brand (there on the right).

This truly has been one of the great joys of my life, making these cakes that I hope will be treasured memories for my grandchildren when they're older and look back on their childhoods.

I'll end this by showing you a few of the cakes I've made over the years.  I might not be an ace, exactly; but if cakes were rated by how much love went into them, I'd probably have few equals.  

Wow, braggadocious once again!  Sorry, dear readers!

Football, monster trucks, Pokemon, and Disney characters (princesses in particular) are common themes in these cakes, you might have noticed.

We have another busy cake month in November, with three grandchildren celebrating birthdays in a 10-day span. And we will be out of town, visiting our oldest son's family in Wisconsin, during that stretch.  So I am planning to bake and decorate three cakes for them before we leave, and drop them off so they can be frozen until needed.

Because CAKE = LOVE.  At least in the Pearl family.

A Typical Sunday Afternoon (in Pictures)

I'm going to try to blog about our most recent Sunday afternoon family brunch, without using words.

I realize I just used words to tell you that.  

Okay, I'll use as few words as possible to show you how sweet these Sunday get-togethers are.

Most Sunday mornings, son #4 and his gang come by after Mass, because the parish church they belong to is halfway between our house and theirs.  It's become our weekly tradition.  But this past Sunday, son #3 and his family joined us as well.  (The two brothers live near each other, about 35 minutes south of us. They have nine kids between them, ranging in age from 4 to 11--and four of them are 9-year-old classmates who are in the same grade at the same school!)

We served two kinds of quiche, two kinds of coffee cake, hash brown casserole, pancakes, sausage, bacon, and fruit.  

This is the first time I tried making pumpkin coffee cake.  It was delish.

It was a gorgeous day, so the kids spent a lot of time outdoors together.

Cornhole!  A game that can be played even in a yard as small as ours.

Cousin besties. Doesn't this scene look like an oil painting or something?

The menfolk enjoyed some fresh air as well.  (I love it when our boys are here, chewing the fat with their dad.)

Talking college football, most likely.

One of my daughters-in-law caught a quick catnap in the living room (aka "Rosary room").  It's so funny how often I find one of the tired parents asleep in here during our casual family get-togethers.  And I'm glad our house offers them a bit of calm in the chaos of their busy lives.

This familiar scene has been shared before here at the blog!  LOL

The kids weren't playing outside the whole time.  It was busy indoors as well...

This grandson never met a toy he didn't like.

...as you can see by the way the basement looked on Monday morning, when I went down there to put it back together.

I don't know what we'd do without our finished basement!

So that's a typical Sunday at Papa and Grammy's house.  It's a kind of glorious chaos.  One thing you can count on is that it will get very loud...and also, drink cups will inevitably be tipped over and spilled on the floor... and undoubtedly, there will be a lot of crumbs and sticky spots (and toys!) to clean up afterward...

But honestly, we wouldn't change a thing.

A Mother Carries Her Babies Forever

I was recently scrolling my Substack feed (this is my new much-too-addictive time-suck, and I fear that I'll have to delete it, like I've deleted all the other social media sites that got to be too much), and I saw this fascinating post.

This explains a lot, doesn't it?  That bond between mother and child is an extraordinary thing.  It's almost like having your very heart living outside your body. It's painful sometimes, for life is so very fragile and the world can be a scary place.  A mother's heart dies a thousand deaths, worrying about her babies.  But it's such a gift, to know that kind of love.  It's hard to imagine a love more profound.  And how incredible that we women were given that wondrous privilege: to be the ones who are co-creators, with God Himself, of human life.  I have five sons, all giants when I stand next to them now, and incredibly--through a miracle so awesome it could only come from God--their first home was in me.  I am often brought to tears by this knowledge.  I love them more than my life!  And  I love the idea that after they were born and started their own lives out in the world, separated from the mama who bore them, they might have left some of their cells behind in me.  I carry those boys with me always!

Dear readers, I'd like to ask you to please keep two of our sons and their wives in your prayers.  Sadly, two of our daughters-in-law recently miscarried babies in their first trimesters (this would have been the 8th child for one couple and the 6th for the other).  These precious wee ones join the nine other tiny Pearls who left this world too soon, before we ever had a chance to meet them, and with whom we hope to be reunited in the next life.  Without Faith--without the belief that God always knows what's best for us, even when our human brains are incapable of understanding why things happen the way they do--life would be unbearable sometimes.  There is so much sadness to endure here in the Valley of Tears.  But how comforting to think that those little ones left a bit of themselves behind in their mothers, and those sweet babies will be a part of them for the rest of their lives.

God is so good.  All the time.

Embracing the "Enough" Mindset

Apparently, there is a new home decor trend called the "Enough Movement."  I just saw an article about this (on Substack, I believe), and as I was reading it I realized that I've been way ahead of the curve on this one.  I had the "Enough" mindset ingrained in me long ago, very early in our marriage.

In a nutshell, here's what it's all about: homeowners are beginning to appreciate "homes that feel complete without constant updates."  They are resisting the urge to "constantly refresh, replace and renovate."  Instead they are embracing the idea of having a place that feels "complete, comfortable and fit for real life, not endless improvement."  It's all about "longevity over novelty and comfort over show."  I love this philosophy!  I love an imperfectly perfect house that has a history and reflects the personalities of the owners so much more than one that is so exquisitely appointed that it looks like it jumped out of the pages of a glossy home decorating magazine.

This, article, my dear readers, puts into words exactly how I've felt about home decor my whole adult life. This was partly because of financial concerns, to be sure (we couldn't have afforded constant home updates when we started out and were raising our five boys, even if we'd wanted them); but it was also because we were trying to be frugal: to feather our nest by doing paint touch-ups when necessary, adorning our walls with meaningful art and framed family photos, repurposing pieces of furniture as our family's needs changed, and purchasing new furniture that we planned (or at least hoped) would last us for years to come.  We were definitely in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp. 

Don't get me wrong: I love a good DIY home project as much as the next gal (such as when my husband and I refinished our basement here in VA to make a giant playroom for our grandkids, or when we turned our attached two-car garage in NH into an awesome sports-themed man cave/mudroom).  But I'm uncomfortable with the idea of ripping out perfectly good kitchen cabinets that are still functional and well-made, for instance, just because they aren't the latest popular style.  In our renovation-crazed culture, this sort of thing has been very much the norm for a number of years now; but I guess the tide is turning a bit.    

Another aspect of the "Enough Movement" is the idea of "choosing contentment over constant change"--and I can totally relate to that sentiment!  I have trouble with change, that's for sure.  Once I grow used to the way things look in our house, and I know that my kids and grandkids have grown used to them, too, I have trouble making any big changes.  I think there's something kind of comforting about the idea of entering a home you've known for years and finding almost everything exactly as you remember it. Especially if it's a warm, cozy, happy home--and I truly do hope that that's the way our family sees our place.  (This past year, I had to change a damaged rug, a runner that goes from our front door into the foyer area of the house.  I tried to get one almost exactly like the old one, but it was just a tad different.  And our then 8-year-old grandson immediately noticed and said, "You got a new rug."  They notice the smallest changes, I'll tell you!)

We've been in this VA house for almost ten years now. And sometimes, I look at the half-bath on the first floor and wonder if I should spruce it up a little.  It really hasn't changed at all since we moved in.  (I wrote a blog post about this bathroom long ago if you want to fact check me on that!)

The former owners had freshly painted these walls before we bought the house, and I liked the sky-blue color they'd chosen, especially since I was planning to have a bird theme going on in here. (I'd had birds in the bathrooms at our old house in NH, where we'd lived for 26 years, and to make this new house feel like "ours," I decided I had to do so again!)   I did decide to paint some fluffy white clouds right off the bat, because I felt like that blue "sky" was crying out for them.  But that's the only change I made.

These are photos taken of the birds on our NH bathroom walls, before
we painted over them to get that house ready for sale.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of pedestal sinks.  I much prefer a vanity with useful storage underneath. But the sink in our VA half-bath is pretty, undamaged, and most importantly, functional; so until it isn't, I'm going to be content to keep it.  (Not long ago, I dropped an old toothbrush down the drain when I was cleaning it, and we couldn't fish it out; so if that drain ever gets hopelessly clogged, we may have to get rid of it one day, and in that case I'll get a vanity.)  I'm also not a huge fan of the mirror above the sink; I probably would have chosen one with a fancy frame if it had been my choice.  But this one has beveled glass, and it's a great size and is doing its job beautifully, so I just can't bring myself to replace it.

My husband loves to play around with ChapGPT, so for fun I asked him to go on there and see what this bathroom would look like if we chose to make it a lot more HGTV-friendly.  I told him to give it the prompt, "show this bathroom with pretty floral wallpaper, a wood vanity with a marble top, and a stylish new mirror."  And this is the result it came up with:

Okay, guys, I get that this AI-designed bathroom is much more beautiful than ours.  I know what good taste looks like when I see it!  But it just doesn't look like "us."  So I guess the sky-blue walls, the clouds, the birds, and the pedestrian sink and mirror are here to stay.  They are, as they say, "Enough" for me.  For now, at least.

What say you, dear readers?  (Be honest, I can take it!)

Reading this post over, I realize that I sound a bit judgy.  So I want to make it clear that what works for me doesn't work for everyone.  Some of my favorite people on earth are really into renovation and redecorating projects, which they see as an outlet for their creativity (in the same way one might enjoy hobbies like sewing, painting, or woodworking).  They love the process itself, because they get true joy from the work involved and the way the results make their homes more efficient and beautiful.  If renovation is your thing, more power to you!  If your surroundings don't give you a feeling of calm and contentment, then by all means, put your DIY hat on and get to work! (And if I ever decide to re-do that bathroom, I'll be in touch!)

We're Back in VA

And it's hot!  So hot!

By the time we left NY yesterday morning, temperatures had been dropping and it was starting to feel almost fall-like; we had been opening up our windows at night to feel cool breezes while we slept.  It sure is different down here. It's about 90 degrees and so humid that it feels like you're breathing through a wet towel.  I can't imagine wanting to open a window, and I've never been more thankful for air conditioning.  Yikes!

But it's so good to be home!!  We've missed our own house, our own bed, our own routines, and most of all, our VA peeps--the three sons and their families who live nearby.

We had a great summer in our old hometown in NY, though.  We got there at the end of June and stayed at my husband's family home most of the time (except for the week we stayed at our Oyster Haven Vrbo house with our whole gang in early July, and another week in August when we blocked it off so that we could get some much-needed plumbing repairs done). It's easy to manage our place from there, because Oyster Haven is just a few miles down the road (and down the lake) from the Pearl homestead. Changeover days are always hard, when one set of renters is checking out by 10:00 a.m. and the next set is arriving by 4:00 p.m. on the same day.  We do have cleaners...but we often have to sort of clean up after them, if you know what I mean.  And my husband and I take all the dirty linens to the laundromat, and I make up all the beds with fresh sheets and towels while my husband cleans the grill, makes sure all the kayaks, paddle boards, and oars are accounted for, and moves the dock if the water level has gotten too low. But other than turnover days, we have a lot of free time to visit with family and enjoy the lake. We spent lots of time on our pontoon boat, any day that weather was permitting.

Most summers, my husband and I are the only steady occupants of his family's house.  All four of his sisters own houses nearby, two as their primary residences and two as vacation homes/rentals.  He has one sister a few doors down who lives there year-round, but her house burned down a little over a year ago and she had to move in while her new house is being built. Another sister lives in FL but also owns a home a few doors down, and for many years it has been mostly a Vrbo rental.  Like us, she blocks it off sometimes for personal use, but she and her husband usually stay at the Pearl family's house when they're visiting. However--her husband recently took a job in the area and they are planning to live there almost year-round now, and to stop renting their home and live in it themselves; but they have renters booked until October, so they, too, had to move into the old homestead this summer.  That means there were three couples sharing the house this year!  (With various and sundry other Pearl relatives popping in for short stays now and then.)  That could have been stressful, but honestly it all went so smoothly and we really enjoyed lots of time together, sharing meals and laughter around the kitchen table.  It helped that each couple had their own full bathroom (in order to make this possible, my husband and I did a minor renovation of the dilapidated basement bathroom, installing a new toilet and vanity and giving it a coat of fresh paint, and that became "our" bathroom), and we also each each had a fridge of our own.  (There are four fridges in that house: one in the kitchen, one in the garage, and two in the basement.  Until this summer, I would have said that having four in one house is overkill; but trust me, all of those fridges were full.)

The night before my husband and I left to head back to VA, we housemates (or "roomies," as we often called each other) decided to take a selfie to commemorate what we are calling "The Summer of Us."

If you must share a house, you couldn't find better people to do that with than these.  

Although I'm glad to be "back where we belong" (to quote one of my sweet little VA granddaughters, who thinks our summers up north are way too long), I'll miss watching the glorious sunrises over the lake as I sip my morning coffee.

The view from the deck of Oyster Haven.

The view from the deck of my husband's childhood home.

The grandkids here are all back in school, and everyone is very busy.  But we're excited to get back to our usual schedule of Sunday brunches and special dinners with the families of sons #2,  #3, and #4, and maybe catching some youth soccer and football games, too.  But even on those days when we can't see any of our peeps, even when it's just my husband and me in our cozy little house down here, going to daily Mass together and eating our simple meals for two, life is good.  So, so good.  It's funny, there are so many times that I'll make some comment and he'll say, "I was just going to say that!"  Or he'll ask a question, and I'll say, "I was just going to ask that myself!"  We are so often thinking about the same thing at the exact same moment. He likes to joke that we have the same brain. Maybe that's what happens when you become best friends and start dating at 15, and you've been married for going-on-46 years--and when you're still each other's favorite person to spend time with and you've talked about everything under the sun.  We like to quote that line from Disney's Frozen: "We finish each other's...sandwiches!"

Yesterday, I was on Substack and someone had shared this poem by Wendell Berry (I think he died recently?); he is the author of the wonderful novel Hannah Coulter, which I absolutely loved.

  

Oh my goodness!  "And when they speak at last it is to say what each one knows the other knows. They have one mind between them, now"... wow!  I think this poem is about my husband and me.  (I'm sure thousands of couples will read it and think so, too.  But really, gang. This is us.)

As far at that whole not knowing "which one goes first through the dark doorway...and which sits on a while alone"...well, I'd just as soon not think about that right now.  As Scarlett O'Hara would say, "I'll think about that tomorrow!"

And for now, I'll bid you goodnight, dear readers.

50th High School Reunion

My husband and I spent last Friday and Saturday nights in our old upstate NY hometown celebrating our 50th reunion with our high school classmates.  We went to a small co-ed Catholic high school that had about 300 students.  (It closed years ago and merged with the once-thriving all-boys Catholic high school across town, and enrollment at this new establishment is so much tinier than either of those schools from our day, sadly.)  We were a class of 80; we heard that there were 46 in attendance at Friday's event and 50 at Saturday's. That includes a number of spouses who didn't go to school with us, but not that many, actually (maybe 10?).  So it was a great turn-out. We have only lost two classmates in all these years, and we did raise a glass to toast them on Saturday night. They were missed!

On Friday night, we met at the lake house of a wonderful girl who was always one of the smartest and nicest in the class.  She and her husband live in NC, but they own a Vrbo rental up in NY like we do. In fact, it's just a bit down the road from our Oyster Haven house.  It was so much fun to just hang out with everyone in her lovely home and back yard--with glorious Lake Champlain as a backdrop--reminiscing and catching up. You would think we'd all seen each other just the other day--it was like picking up right where we left off after graduation (with a lot more wrinkles and less and/or graying hair!).  There were margaritas on tap, and appetizers, and pizzas from the downtown Italian restaurant owned by the family of one of our classmates, where we used to go after Friday night football games. The party was officially from 4:00-7:00, but my husband and I weren’t on our way home until about 9:00. A great time was had by all.

We had such a nice class; I think it was rather extraordinary, honestly.  You know how some classes just get along? (I mean, there were different groups of good friends, but no one excluded anyone else from any group and there was none of that "mean girl" stuff or extreme cliquey-ness.)  Teachers liked us, because we weren't troublemakers.  One of our teachers came to the party on Friday.  She was a sophomore homeroom teacher and taught biology, and we were the very first class she had after she got her degree.  She was only about eight years older than we were, and although she was no-nonsense and expected good behavior in her class, she was fun and we could always make her laugh.

Case in point: when we went to take a group picture Friday night, our crazy friend picked her up.  She's such a good sport--look at the way she's laughing! (But I did put that star there because I'm not sure she'd want her hiked-up dress on the Internet!)

Saturday night there were cocktails and a buffet dinner at my sister-in-law's brewery/restaurant.  The people who'd been in charge of organizing this reunion really went above and beyond with the set-up and decorations. Everything looked amazing.  And there were so many nostalgia-inducing items on display, all kinds of memorabilia from our high school days.  I was tickled to see that they'd used the artwork I did for the cover of our senior yearbook to decorate wine bottles donated by a guy in our class, boxes of chocolate truffles donated by a gal in our class, and the top of the sheet cake. (I was accused of depicting my boyfriend and myself when I drew that yearbook cover; and while I don't think I MEANT to do that, consciously...I believe that might be what I did!) 

I wore a dress I've had for a while that I just love, because it's so loose and flowy and comfy, and the print is so pretty...and it must be a popular style, because three of us at the party were dressed almost identically.  LOL!

Another teacher of ours (our English teacher, who was also quite young when she taught our class) was there to celebrate with us that night. The grandson and son-in-law of our late classmate DJ'd the party, and they played some of the oldies-but-goodies from our era. There was even some dancing.  It really was just so much fun, and I'll never forget it.   I'm so grateful to have been able to grow up with this amazing group of people and so happy that my husband and I were able to be there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our graduation from a high school that will always hold a special place in our hearts.  We were the lucky ones, I tell you.  The seventies were actually a pretty sweet time to be a teenager. Things seemed so much simpler then.  We spent our days together at school, but we mostly left it all behind when we went home to our families.  No Facebook.  No social media posting.  No constant texts and phone calls.  (Well, full disclosure: there were frequent too-long phone calls with my high school sweetheart, whispering in corners with the landline phone cord stretched as far as it could go...ha ha, those were the days...)

I only have a few regrets about the reunion.  I wish I'd asked more questions about what different folks were up to. Afterward, I thought of all the missed opportunities for finding out about what's been going on in people's lives.  It's not that I didn't have some nice conversations, I did; but I wish I'd talked more. I've never been the best at the spoken word (give me a pen and paper--or a keyboard—and I do much better). I usually think of things I should have said hours after a conversation ends.  

I also wish everyone could have been there.  We were missing some of our classmates dearly.  One of them, our prom king who is always in the mix when anything is being planned for our class, lost his father shortly beforehand and obviously couldn't be there.  That left a bit of a hole. 

But God willing, there will be more reunions!  In general, the people I went to high school with are looking pretty fit and healthy.  (68 is the new 48! That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)  We've all changed physically in the 50 years since our graduation, because how could we not?  But it's amazing how in some ways everyone seems just the same...as if we were back in those good old days, young, with our whole lives ahead of us.  I love how much these people whose lives are forever intertwined with mine still seem to look and speak and act just like those kids I knew long ago, when I was about the age of my oldest granddaughters. (Incredibly, those granddaughters are the very age their Papa and I were when we started dating!)

I’m not surprised that our reunion was such a success. That’s our class for you.

I think I'll end this with a ChatGPT version of our group picture that someone made and posted on Facebook.  (I'm not on there anymore, and I took almost no pictures, which is so unlike me.  So I've been relying on my sister to scope out our class FB page for photos and send them on to me.)

If only my real hair could ever look as good as it does in this picture!

Lookin' good, gang.  God bless the Class of 1976!