Friends

A small group, five, six, sometimes seven with different challenges and lives meet about twice a year when everyone can be in the same place. We know each other, appreciate each other and are a loud and fun group dealing with life and its challenges, health, age and ailing parents, daughters, only daughters in this group, poetry, language, literature, travels and staying home by necessity, animals. It is a strange homecoming in the diversity of the other's life.

For the first time my mother asked my name. Our conversation though was a happy one. Smiles touched with melancholy.