Women together

Our children gave us to each other. We women first met when they were four and five years old, at that little school with a social conscience and a working farm. Twenty-five years later our baby birds have built their own nests, but we women still gather when we can, less often than we used to, because one of us lives upstate now, another has grandmother duties, a third is caring for elder parents, life does take new shapes through the years, but last night four of us got together for a meal and to share hearts in the home of one of us, the rooms so familiar from past eras of our lives that it felt like a kind of homecoming—especially as we then proceeded to remind ourselves that we can still empty all our cares into each others' rueful laughter, and not take ourselves too seriously, and rest in the company of warrior mothers who have traveled alongside us, village women who helped us parent our children when they were still just sprouts and weeds. Now, all these years later, how wonderful to know that when we come together, it is as it always was, we are still safe with each other, still deeply known, still made more whole in the comfort of longstanding, free floating, woman centered love.