Whither the Weekend?

Ah, the weekend.
A flighty temptress is she.
I just enjoyed a particularly agreeable one with a group of my college girlfriends. Once a year, we shed the many-colored coats of our husbands, children, and normal lives to get together and don the gold-sequined garb of giggly college girls once again. We all enjoy making scrapbooks for our families, so we work on those, providing excellent fodder for catching up on each other's worlds. We watch chick-flicks (which, I admit, is not my personal favorite genre of movies, but it's not all bad, either. However, if I'm subjected to "The Cutting Edge" with Moira Kelley and DB Sweeney one more time...). And, most prominently featured in our weekends together - we LAUGH. A lot. I have some really insane friends, holy cow. Praise the Lord I'm so straight-laced and level-headed, lemme tell ya...

I've noticed this in year's past, but while we're together, it's as if my whole world of family, work, stress, joys... LIFE... is condensed down and folded up, as though to put in a locket to wear near my heart. Still there, and still precious... but yet smaller somehow. I open this locket up to show the girls what's inside, but then it's all tucked back in, and existence as I know it balloons out to what's going on with these wonderful women. We relax, we share, we eat, we sleep, we're quiet, we work, we solve the world's problems, we pray over the smaller ones happening in our own worlds we can't so easily solve, we are serious, we are silly.
And when our weekend is over, the reverse happens. The time with my friends is condensed down and folded up, put in it's own locket... still there, still precious... and my blessed and crazy regular world takes it's place once more.

In a different vein, you know the REALLY funny thing about our weekends together?
We work on scrapbooks, right? Meaning, pictures. And preserving memories. Of good times. With people we love. Right. So, one would think a group of college-educated, well-rounded, intelligent women would all think to... oh, I don't know... BRING A CAMERA AND TAKE PICTURES OF OUR WEEKENDS TOGETHER!
Thank God for Adrienne, though. She remembers. The rest of us? We're all slapping our foreheads, saying to each other, "Oh yeah!..."
Good Heavens. But I warned you, didn't I?... We're an insane bunch.
God bless'em all.