Serendipity allowed me to celebrate my birthday recently with a girls’ weekend.
It started with my annual shopping trip with Lynne, a former Emporian whom I met 15 years ago when we both managed retail stores in the Flinthills Mall. She’s since moved to Derby, but we have a tradition of shopping together that’s in its seventh year.
We started our tradition in 2000 when the Women of Faith tour was in Minneapolis on my birthday. I’d missed going to closer Women of Faith events for two years running. The first time, Greg came down with the chickenpox the same weekend his family was coming for a visit. The second time was right after my mom died.
So, 2000 seemed a perfect time to attend. And the fact that the event coincided with my birthday in a town that boasted the Mall of America seemed perfect. I talked Lynne into an airplane trip and away we went.
During our Mall of America trip, we discovered the Christopher & Banks women’s apparel store. Lynne and I can tell you where all of their locations are in Kansas. There may not be one in Emporia, but there are two in Wichita.
That knowledge, and The Gazette’s policy of a paid day off for birthdays, created the foundation of our traditional shopping day.
Then Kansas Professional Communicators stepped in. I’ve been an officer in the organization since 2005, and we have quarterly board meetings. The meetings moved to Wichita last year, and August’s meeting fell on Aug. 11, my 43rd birthday. There I was planning to shop on the 10th and attend a meeting the 11th.
Enter my Aunt Gracie.
Just shy of two years older than my mother, Gracie has lived in Kansas, Arkansas and Massachusetts. I think there was a stint in Colorado, too, but I was young then. In 2006, Gracie decided to move back to Kansas, purchasing her daughter’s house in Derby.
“You always have a place here,” Gracie told me last fall.
I e-mailed asking whether she had a spare bed on the 10th. She did, so I stayed.
Ahhh, heaven. During lunch on Friday, Lynne and I caught up on the past year. We e-mail each other, but save most of our kibitzing for lunches, some of which happen when she visits Emporia.
That night, Gracie and I caught up. And I heard new family stories. My mother might have told them to me, but my own boys are proof that if a child isn’t interested at that moment, parents are tuned out.
Then on Saturday, after our board meeting, five of us KPC women went to lunch. I don’t know whether guys go to lunch after board meetings. If they do, I don’t know what they talk about.
We didn’t talk business. We talked about Amy’s vacation on the back of a motorcycle, riding through the south with her husband, sister, brother-in-law, and 10-year-old son, Liam, who came to lunch with us. Sheila and I compared notes on having high school freshman in the house — my son and her daughter. We cheered for Jennifer’s national awards in agriculture writing. And we heard Teresa’s story of her recent career move from a job that was a bad fit back to her old job at Wichita State.
At church on Sunday, someone asked whether my boys had been nice to me on my birthday and given me good presents. My answer — yes, they did.
My cell phone never rang and no one piled on the guilt when I came home Saturday afternoon. Best of all, I discovered that my batteries were recharged and I’m ready to tackle the upcoming school year and anything else that pops up surrounded by my family and friends both near and far.