We'll Always Be Bosom Buddies

While we were in Ohio two of my very best friends from college drove in to see us and spend a couple days getting to know baby Arthur.
I started school at Cottey College, a two-year liberal arts college for women in Southwestern Missouri. My sister attended Cottey and I had decided to go there when we dropped her off the summer in between my eighth and ninth grade year.
Isn't it beautiful?

I had a room mate and her name was Ellen. She put plants all around our room. I got used to stepping in potting soil as soon as I entered. We pushed our beds together so they made one long bed along the end of our room and would pile onto it and eat Jello No Bake Cheesecakes straight from the pie tin. We participated in Cottey traditions together and went on walks down by the lake and I went home with her for Easter. In short, she became my best friend.
At the same time, I took a theatre class with a girl named Katie who was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Newsies and the Mighty Ducks. In other words, she was me.
Katie was room mates with Heather who was twin sisters with Helen. They were funny and way WAY cooler than most everyone I had ever been friends with. They were from Washington and somehow that made them seem more mature and cosmopolitan to little old Mid-Western me.
Helen was room mates with Jaclyn, who was this tiny ball of energy. At first I thought she was sort of full of herself and, well, annoying. It turns out, however, that she was destined to be a true companion to me.

 Us In Rome

The six of us did everything together. By the time we graduated we had been doing things together so often and consistently that we had shortened "the six of us" to just "The Six." It seems sort of ridiculous that I have a group of friends that has a title, but I do.

After Hanging of the Greens in 2003

We're all spread across the country now, but with Jaclyn in Detroit and Ellen in Ithaca, our trip to Columbus meant we were in driving distance for a visit.

So they came and met Arthur.

He liked Ellen a whole lot. 

Jaclyn couldn't stop speaking in Greek and Polish to him. 

And we went to the AMAZING Franklin Park Conservatory.

And had lunch and talked and laughed and acted as though we hadn't spent a day apart since our days together in college. We missed Katie and Helen and Heather and our other Cottey friends, but it was so nice to at least have half of The Six in one place. 

It made me feel very lucky to have had such an amazing college experience and to have such wonderful women in my life.