(Actually, we’re staying in Seaside, not Monterey, but it all runs together…)
One of the great things about visiting with good friends is that even when it’s been nearly eight years since you last saw them, once you get together it just seems like yesterday.
It’s weird in a way. You spend so long building up to this big trip, it seems like it should feel more intense somehow when you get there. Like you should feel everything a little more strongly. Instead, it just feels normal, making it hard to comprehend, at the end, that it’ll likely be another several years before you see each other again. I’ve had this same sense of unrealness with all the good friend’s we’ve visited, where it seems so normal, but by it’s very normalcy, somehow seems surreal.
We’ve just spent a lovely three day weekend with some good friends who I used to live with when I was at university in Santa Cruz. They have three children of similar ages to ours, their eldest just about to turn eight and their youngest just six months old. Last time we saw them they had only a three-month-old baby, and we had a nearly two-year-old Liam.
What makes the time until we see them again seem more poignant, and more real, is knowing that next time we come, the elder children will likely be teenagers, and the youngest two will have skipped right through the toddler and preschool years and into grade school.
