The two cats and the dog spend so much time sleeping it boggles my mind. Gracie goes out a couple of times a day, does her crazy run around the yard then runs back inside panting and has gross spit on her face from her tongue hanging out as she ran. Her run is the whole perimeter of the yard including up one set of deck stairs then down the other. She has worn a path all along the fence. The cats alternate sleeping between the living room and the den. Right now they’re here with me.

The day is another ugly one with grey-white skies. Snow is predicted for the weekend, and the weatherman has hedged all his bets. Last night on the 11 o’clock news, he gave three possibilities for amounts of snow. Ours ranged from a dusting to three inches. North of us will be getting more in any scenario. That makes me happy.

I’ve lost track of most of my childhood friends. We send Christmas cards which I always think of as the last refuge for any friendship. They usually mean we don’t want to lose each other entirely, but we don’t have much in common any more. When I used to visit my mother, I’d go see my friend Maria who lives a street over from my mother’s house. We date back to my fifth grade, her sixth. My mother was her girl scout leader for a time. We were both in the drill team for years. We started together in the junior drill team which had practice on Saturday mornings. While the instructor worked with one group, we’d get bored and start talking. I’d start the conversation, and she’d reply then she was always the one caught talking. I called it the second man rule: the first one draws attention and the second one gets caught. Maria still remembers.

When I went to Ghana is really when I lost track of most of my childhood and college friends. We wrote each other for a while, but then the letters were fewer and fewer and finally they stopped. My friends went on with lives very different from mine. Most of them were working and a few go married. I was living in Africa, and that very was far removed from any of their experiences. One came and visited me in Ghana for a week, and he’s the one with whom I kept in touch the longest but eventually we too drifted apart. Every now and then I see one of my old friends, but after the pleasantries we don’t have a whole lot to talk about.

It’s different with my Peace Corps friends. We always have something to talk and laugh about and it’s not just Ghana. We have a connection that never weakens despite how long it’s been since we’ve last seen each other. My friends Bill and Peg were still my friends after so many years. It was as if we’d last seen each other the week before, not decades before. I treasure these friendships and our shared experiences. Michelle drops a line often, especially when something in Coffee jogs a memory or relates to whatever she’s doing now. These are the friends I met in Philadelphia, a week before we left for Ghana, or during training that whole summer of 1969, and these are friends I always visited going up or down country. We traveled together on school holidays. Ralph still remembers our dinner of barbecued lobsters on the terrace at a hotel in Lome’, Togo.

I have friends here who have been my friends for over forty years. Others have been friends less time, but our friendship is as strong as if we’ve known each other forever.

I have always considered myself lucky in the friends I have.