I Miss...

I miss the old days. The days when we had a small group of 25-35 people at our house almost every week. It wasn't a small group ~ it was almost a small church. We had so much fun together. We laughed hysterically and when times were tough, as they were early last year, we cried and clung to our group for dear life.

I miss that. And I miss them.

We had our group for just over a year and it was a mixture of sheer chaos and pure joy. During the summer, we met down at the beach. Those were the best of times. We all brought 'whatever' and sometimes we ended up with wine and cheese and Oreos, and sometimes we ended up with a full meal. We laughed about the organic Oreos (what an oxymoron) and the wheat germ brownies. We tried our darndest to keep the babies from eating sand and throwing sand, but we failed sometimes. We would kayak and play volleyball and swing and drink coffee. We even all took a trip to Canada last year. Try putting 28 people together in a tiny cabin that is about half the size of our house ~ miraculously, it worked!

It was our own little community. We'd kidnap each other at night to go out for coffee or a movie, and I rarely remember going to the grocery alone at night. If I was going out, someone was going with me and then we'd be forced to stop for coffee and talk until the wee hours.

Group never started at 7:00 like it was supposed to. We always said to come at 6:30 for drinks, but people came from around 4:00 on. Nobody knocked, they just came in. They brought food and drinks and kids, so many kids. The kids were nutty. One night I looked out the window and saw the teenagers leading the little ones in swordfighting ~ with rakes and piks and shovels. The guys sat outside on the deck and smoked cigars after group. They would talk into the night, sometimes laughing and sometimes it looked really serious.

Not that I loved every minute of it. I would escape to my room sometime during the evening to get some quiet time. And sometimes the kids drove me insane, especially since every week we would encourage the parents to get up and check on their own kids, but few did. It would stress me out sometimes and the mess afterwards was no picnic, but doggone it...

I miss it. And I miss them.

Have you ever moved or ever had a close friend move and you vow and swear and make a blood pact (okay, maybe not that far) that you are never, ever going to lose contact ~ that nothing is going to change? Yeah, so did we. The night we had to give our group away, we all thought it was going to stay the same. New people would run it, but we'd all still be the closest of friends. We'd still go to the group, so really, nothing would change except the location and facilitator.

And then, life happened.

It turned out that we couldn't keep going to the same group. We were asked not to go. Not by anyone in the group, but asked nonetheless. And so we felt like the group needed the group more than it needed us, so that was the end of that. Sure, we still have a few friends from the group, but without making a point to meet weekly, most friendships fell away.

Daggone it. I miss those days.

I don't want sympathy and I don't want a new group. Jon keeps trying to 'fix' all of this. It can't be fixed and we can't go back. Those were different days and a different job and different relationships. But I miss them. And just for tonight, I want them back.