Retrospective.

I’m home now.

(I have been for several days.)

The Asheville Girls Party has ceased.

There are dirty dishes in our sink (but not because Kevin and Riley didn’t take care of all that. They were amazing- but that’s a post for another day.) Laundry needs to be shifted from washer to dryer. I need to unpack my suitcase and put away the excessive number of clothes I brought with me (just because I could).

But it is good to be home actually.

I always sleep better in my own crumpled dilapidated bed beside my husband.

But it was good to be gone too.

Good good good to relax with friends who are tried and true.

Tried and true.

I know it’s a cliche. (And I don’t especially care for cliches.)

However.

These women are tried and true I’m telling you.

Tried through decades of friendship. Years stacked on years. Marriages and babies and bridesmaid dresses and maternity clothes and denim bib overalls. (We attended college in the 90’s. We thought overalls were fashionable.)

We met when we were practically still children. Or worse – young adults. Whatever that means.

We shared hair dryers and bathroom sinks and car rides. We shared a blue trailer in Kentucky and the heartbreak that only twenty-year-old females experience. We ate macaroni and cheese and $5 pizzas and pondered our presents and our futures over episodes of Oprah Winfrey and Friends and ER. We share the same birthday in different months – the 23rd – repeated three times.

Our favorite store was The Gap Outlet where jeans were $9.99 and we paid $67 each per month for our low-quality residence.

And true.

Goodness. It would require another decade to unpack all the means and manners that make this true part evident.

The highs. The lows. The joys. The sorrows.

The hand holding, burden bearing, path walking kind of friendship.

The long distance phone calls, hours spent in a car to hug your friend’s neck, e-mails, letters and road trips.

In college, we nursed one another’s heartaches. We helped with studying and meals and the drama we dragged into our own lives.

And when we grew older, when we left the trailer in three separate cars in three different directions – south, north and east – we stayed, we stuck, we persevered in one another’s lives.

We drove every which way to stand in matching dresses at weddings. We drove back again to meet newborn babies, to celebrate July Fourth, to play paintball, to celebrate turning thirty, to take our girls to summer camp together, to visit new houses, new jobs, new ventures.

I was at Beth‘s house when my dad called me to say my mom was so sick she wouldn’t survive the week. Gretchen drove twelve hours to sit on my sofa when I called her in tears about a crisis.

Tried and true.

I think it’s a cliche I can live with.

And these women were a blessing to spend several days with last week.

And yes – I’ll use the word blessing in this post rife with cliches even if Beth teases me when I say it.