Homecomings

The time is coming.

The twenty year high school reunion.

It sounds so old to me. How am I old enough to be out of high school for twenty years? Ryan and I talked the other day, after seeing a picture of friends our age who have teenage kids, and we decided not having kids makes us feel younger. Like we're somehow prolonging any aging process because we don't have kids growing older before our very eyes to remind us that we are doing the same thing.

Anyway. Twenty years. Twenty years since I roamed the halls of our little high school, slamming my shiny green locker door shut and scurrying to make it to whatever reach of the brick building before the tardy bell rang. Twenty years since I took my place at the end of the long lunch table, eating the infamous rectangle "pizzas" and drinking the iced tea I paid extra to have. Twenty years since an unknown substance in the Chemistry lab ate a hole in the front of my skirt and twenty years since I made endless batches of chocolate chip cookies in the Home Ec kitchens.

Social media changes the face of reunions. There's no reason to go back to see who got married, who stayed skinny and who found success, because a quick scroll through Facebook will tell you all of that {and probably a whole lot more you didn't care to know}.

This week, I started reading Christie Purifoy's book, Roots and Sky, and she says "Homecoming is a single word, and we use it to describe a single event. But true homecoming requires more time. It seems to be a process rather than a moment...homecoming is always a return and our understanding of home deepens with each encounter."

The weekend of the reunion, I plan to "go home" {which is really not far from where I am now} and see people that I sometimes see and sometimes never see. I'll take with me a husband who spent all those years in the same building, but I never had a clue I would end up belonging to him. I'll see the real life versions of the people I see online every day. And that will be my single-word homecoming.

But Christie's right. Homecoming DOES require more time. It is a process. The Facebook page our class president started just a couple of days ago to contain all the plans for that single event has already been flooded with throwback pictures. Fuzzy photos of skinny kids with LOTS of hair product, wearing pleated pants and turtlenecks, perms and pegged jeans, and possessing no clue of what was ahead of them.

We're posting and gasping and liking and giggling like elementary kids again, but in that, we're processing the people we were and the people we are now, and we're uncovering more of who we are by remembering who we were. And I think I like it - the process homecoming.

And I thought you might enjoy a little Friday fun! Here are some of the gems my classmates dug up. Can you find me? {It's easier in some than others.}

{Ask Ryan which ones confused him!!}