I'm home from the Catskills, pleasantly exhausted. brooklynite and chi_editrix are the greatest people in the world, but we all knew that already. Thanks again, you two (you five, really, including all the adjunct hosts). I had a lovely time, with bouncing babies and rambunctious kids and too-seldom-seen good friends. It was particularly nice to have some of the folks from the other side of the pool participate this year, though I feel like we began to strain the upper limit in terms of the sheer number of people. We desperately wished for JRH to be there so he could have written things down.


But it was a bittersweet weekend, too. I kept glimpsing someone standing across the room and briefly thinking, "Oh, there's Madeleine," before realizing that of course it wasn't, it was just Perg sitting in a certain loose-limbed way, or the way Kim's hair looked from the back in a certain light. And then yesterday a friend who was with us had a serious medical crisis that served as yet another reminder of how ephemeral all this can be. As I was driving home this afternoon I remembered the distinct moment a few years ago when it suddenly hit me that this seemingly permanent group of Best Mates would one day be faced with one of us dying, unless the group fell apart first, which would be almost like a death itself. But then the possibilities seemed distant enough that I didn't need to think about them seriously yet.

Now, though, what feels like a split second later, we're already there. Two of our group died last year (and I never in a million years would have expected one of them to be Madeleine -- she was supposed to be a crotchety, sharp-faced nonagenarian still living in her narrow house with her critters and books and music), and a number of others experienced serious illnesses or other life changes. The cellar door has opened, and mortality is peeking out and grinning at us.

Of course time and change bring new life and other great joys, too, and our group has experienced that as well over the past few years. This weekend was a particularly poignant reminder of the trade-off, with ghosts of memory drifting through the crowd of happily gurgling babies.

I hate feeling vulnerable and impotent.