I just put out my fall decorations and the cabbage is in the pot cooking. So why is my mind dipping into the great old memory bank of my nine friends? Usually I do this kind of thinking and solving of world affairs when ironing (anything to get my mind off the unruly task of holding a hunk of metal and pressing down on cloth while sweating in a closed in area of the basement). At any rate if you saw the movies Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatoes this group of which I am a part of is a combination of both those movies.
We are ten women with an age range of ten years. Yes there is a matron, a stand-in matron, and the kid. We are all still married to the same spouse, I taking the trophy for the most years, 38. We have children that have gone through elementary school, middle school and high school together. Some of us read Dr. Spock and knew exactly what to do with the crying babies while the rest of us just fumbled through and cried with them. We made it through the cuts and bruises of childhood, the horrible teen years while our children tried to find their own identity. Then we re-mortgaged the house and watched our kids go off to college. The empty nest syndrome happened and we all had to deal with reacquainting ourselves with our spouses once the last of the kids left home. The next phase of our lives was witnessing the weddings and then the births of grandchildren.
Yes, you could say we have the backdrop for at least a made for TV movie if not the silver screen biggie. It could be mini episodes dealing with the identity of each one of us individually (and being 10 we each have our own distinct personalities), or just one conglomerate of our lives intertwining. Perhaps it's time to revive the book episodes. After all the Bobbsey Twins and Hardy Boys were good for our generation. Maybe it's time to revive an age frame of books for our present era. After all there were 68 books that Laura Lee Hope wrote about the Bobbsey Twins, and I have at least that many stories to tell. I'll have to contemplate this idea with this my next batch of ironing.
