What

I want to write about the weekend, leaving it in the warm, diffuse light of the Canadian sun shining through the windows of a cabin on the shore of Lake Erie. The warmth of wood walls painted in cheerful apples with Christian names of family who sleep in these bunks and tent in the yard. Who comb the beach looking for smooth stones with a hole that goes the way through.

I came without expectations...without anticipations.

The Steven King novella titled with a Ben E. King song came out the summer I turned 13. There's a line at the end about how you never have friends like you do when you're 12, and I remember the group I was in with and how we laughed easily and often. Your words spilled freely, some nice and some not, but they were accepted as they were and not subject to the later angsty teenage paranoia and interpretation.

To be in a group of women, a group of friends some of whom friends longer than half their lives, longer than they can remember a time before they were friends is like being able to step back into that moment of time when you were too self-conscious to let a friend see you exactly as you are and not as you'd like to be or as you like for people to see you.

And maybe it is this group of friends that the love is just so big and so deep that you're instantly enveloped in it.

And maybe it is being in a cottage so full of five generations of family.

Maybe it is the easy laughter, the in-jokes, the release of being undefined by husbands and children. Maybe it was the August snow and full arched rainbow in the middle of the drive home and yesterdays storms.

I feel renewed. And yet, already counting down the days until WTHS 2009...