"Wherever you are, its your friends who make your world."

This week I started saying goodbye to the people who allowed me to call Columbus "home" for over five years.


I ate sushi with the truth-telling friend who I met at the JCC when I first moved to town and invited me and my son to join a playgroup, thereby introducing me to a group of women who quickly became old friends.  The kind of friends who love you and make you laugh even when you crash your car (repeatedly) or drop your child (on a cold, hard mall floor), and who make everything you do - as a mother and as a woman - seem possible and fabulous.  


My family ate dinner last night with our quintessential always-there-to-help even in the middle of the night when you have to take your husband to the hospital midwest neighbors, who have the lovely twist of being wine connoisseurs/store owners and gave Larry & I a delectable way of ending each day with a full glass.


Tonight, that beautiful, kind midwest girl who chose to stay, but is as fun and fashionable as any in NYC is hosting a goodbye gig for a bunch of my girlfriends at her house.  Her co-host is my scarecrow in this tale.  Remember that part in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is leaving to go back to Kansas and she says, "I think I will miss you most of all."  Yeah, thats her.  I'm going to miss her advice (yes, you are always right), her laugh (you are so pretty), her sarcastic wit (oy, have I mentioned I think this is your ticket to the big bucks?), her constant support (thank you), and her daughter's clothes.  


I am looking forward to this evening, and dreading it, and am immensely grateful to all who are willing to show up.  Pictures to follow.


And because I'm (temporarily) out of words, indulge me please as I steal a few:
"This is not the end.  This is not even the beginning of the end.  It is, instead, the end of the beginning." - Winston Churchill
"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance: they make the latitudes and longitudes." - Henry David Thoreau