I attended my High School reunion last Saturday. Yes, I wore Stitch Fix. No, not the Moto Jacket. (Too warm). It’s taken me four days to process the experience and I’m still not sure what to say, other than that it was so incredibly good and I’m really glad I went. But I haven’t blogged since May (sorry!) I figured I’d dive in and post something in the hopes that some thoughts will make sense as I go.

I grew up in a small town in Maine where we went to school in the same yellow building from Kindergarten through 8th grade. After that we moved up to the High School, where we merged with kids from the town next to us. By senior year, our graduating class was about 150 people. Everyone knew everyone else, and almost everything about each other.

This was the first reunion I’ve been able to make since we graduated. I’m in awe of what it felt like to be back together in the same room with people with whom I share so much of history…and yet in most cases, we knew next to nothing about each other’s current lives. I was surprised how NICE that was. Sure we did some updating. I have friends with grandkids, and friends with newborns. We’ve had moves and career changes, big wins and hard hits. But mostly we reminisced about what it was like to grow up in our little corner of the universe, and how differently we see it now.  We were all sort of staring at each other in this happy way, saying things like “this is surreal…” and “I can’t believe you’re here…” interspersed with the most common comment of the night, “WHY did we all have such ridiculous hair???”  It was so much goodness wrapped up in one event.

I realize how protected we were back then. And how privileged. We weren’t wealthy (at least most of us weren’t) and our families weren’t perfect. But the world was manageable, and there was time and space for us to grow into it. And we were just a good group of people. That makes a difference.

I hope to have more thoughts on this at some point. But for now I’ll just say, Kids: go ahead and perm your hair before your senior pictures! It will give you a great icebreaker at your reunions for years to come ;)