They moved out of state to be with their men. They come back to visit every couple years – to be with the girls. To be GIRLS.

Lin moved to Sonoma seven years ago to reunite with her husband who decided to practice family medicine there.  Laura moved to the Twin Cities over fifteen years ago to start a second marriage and begin a second career.

I’ve known Laura for forty years and have known Lin for a few years longer. As high school freshmen, the three of us used to wear black matching turtle necks (from JC Penney) and tight fitting jeans and march down the streets of Melrose Park together like a determined, but hardly threatening, pack of cubs on a wilding. We called ourselves the Punkettes.

The annual Italian Feast in Melrose Park where we grew up was the main event Lin and Laura scheduled their travel plans around, but I simply think they were both due for a girls weekend. Yes, Laura craved an Italian beef sandwich, apparently a local delicacy that is not to be had in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and I think Lin needed to laugh from her belly, which we all seem to do naturally when we get together.

We had dinner together at another friend’s Friday night and pulled up to Larry’s house on Saturday afternoon to properly launch our tour of Our Lady of Mount Caramel’s annual summer carnival.  Larry, a good high school buddy, was flattered that the girls were going to include him in our day’s plans. At this point, he didn’t know that he’d drop $20 trying to win a Carney grade stuffed panda for me.

When we called him on Friday to confirm our plans for the following day, he was more than excited.

“This will be fun,” he said. “I’m making Jell-O shots. We can do them at my place before we head to the Feast.”

As if we were still the Punkettes, Lin, Laura and I looked at each other.  None of us had done Jell-O shots before, but our reaction was Sure, why not? We were tickled Larry wanted to make something special for us.

While Lin, Laura, and I talked health, home repair, and other topics suiting our ages over the weekend, to a large degree, we acted very much like sixteen year-olds. We always seemed to be up to try something new.

We felt like we did when we were sixteen – when driving was new; when kissing was new; when we were probably equally preoccupied with fitting in and establishing a unique social identity.

And of course, we wanted to have fun. Maybe we succumbed to the thought that our adult lives were too complex to keep this a priority, but when we got together (okay, maybe aided by whipped cream topped cherry liqueur flavored Jell-O shots), FUN became Number ONE again.

For three days, we stopped watching our diets. We laughed until we made uncontrollable snorting noises we might not have felt free to do if our partners were within earshot. We interrupted each other without taking offense, enthusiastically wanting to interject a recollection of a personal experience before the memory became irrelevant. And we reminded each other that, essentially, we hadn’t changed in forty years.

For three days, three fifty-something year-old women lived like sixteen year-old girls – and that’s no small thing.