For months I’ve been looking forward to my 50^th high school reunion. Note that typing those words is, um…difficult. When one is young, old people muttering how fast time flies is something we tend to ignore. But decades later, when my 96-year-old mother looked at me and said, “I never thought it would go so fast,” I finally understood. That comment sent a chill down my spine and cemented the idea that the older we get the quicker that life clock ticks.

There were a lot of people I wanted to see, but mostly it was my three best friends: Jill Paskow, Shelly Sherman, and Denise Carra, all of whom I met in elementary school. We marched through junior high and high school in lockstep, but after graduation we went to colleges in different states and ended up spread across the country.

I left Livingston, New Jersey in 1973. My friends scattered. Marriages happened. Babies were born. Close friends and family members died. But despite the years that divided us from our youth, the memories of our time together as kids remain vivid: South Mountain Arena where we ice skated, camping on Eagle Island in the Adirondacks, those meetings of the Bridge Club where we talked endlessly about boys and secretly read Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), and holiday celebrations with Denise’s huge Italian family, where her Sicilian grandmother, Noni, who spoke no English, would pat us on our cheeks, apparently assuming we were all her grandchildren.

When I boarded the plane in Phoenix, Arizona, one that took me back to Northern New Jersey, I hadn’t been in that part of the country for over a decade, nor had I had much interaction with my high school pals, aside from the occasional email or Facebook posts.

My visit made me wish we’d spent more time with one another over the years, but I can’t fix that now. All I can do is rejoice in the fact that I got to visit my friends: Shelly, Jill, Denise, and many others.

And it was glorious.

Anne Montgomery’s novels can be found wherever books are sold.

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