Last Day

I have raised an independent daughter. So it is no surprise that I was not needed to help get her ready to leave in the morning. Is she packed? Not yet, but she will be. So I was blessed today with a visit from my boarding school friend Sally Peck who is North Carolina dropping her last son off for his Freshman year at Elon.
Sally and I have not seen each other for almost 20 years, we think. Of course we are both too old to remember when we saw each other last, but it had to have been at one Walker’s reunion. It makes no difference at all because we picked right up where we left off starting at high school graduation. 
There are no friends like those you live with at school, be it boarding school or college. As Sally and I reminisced about friends from our class we agreed that people don’t change. That can be a good or bad thing. The one thing you discover is that no one can be something they are not when you live together for at least a year.
Sally was and still is one of the sweetest people I ever knew. She always had a kind word for you and never said anything ugly about anyone. That is a rare quality, especially among adolescent girls. If I could have a do over it is a quality I would like to have developed.
I hope that Carter makes those kind of friends in college. She can’t help but get to know people well when there are only 60 of them living and learning in the same place for a semester. She certainly has had plenty of practice living with new people working at camp for the last few years.

After Sally left to go back to Elon, Russ Carter and I went downtown to Pizza Toro for our final goodbye dinner. She is ready to go, even if she isn’t packed. Russ and I joked that we were going to go over to the RV show after we drop her off at the airport. She said she would not be surprised if when she got home from Germany she found a note on our front door that said, “Good luck, we are out.” Russ followed it up with, “What door? We will have sold the house.”  We have to joke or I will cry.