Junebug Skipping Like a Stone: Thanksgiving Reunions

I have one of the weirdest educational histories you will ever encounter, because I have transferred a lot. And I don't just mean in colleges - although that is definitely the case - but I also attended two middle schools and two high schools. And then 3 colleges, before returning to the first one again, which is so different at this point it may as well be considered a 4th college.

I wouldn't really trade the experiences at each of these schools because they were so different. One middle school was a very large public school and one was a small private school; one high school was a gifted student magnet school which was housed inside of an inner city Richmond school, which was well known across the state, and the other was a tiny private school in the middle of Powhatan that no one has ever heard of. As for the colleges, one has been an amazing experience both times, one was in the middle of nowhere, VA and a mistake that I had to make in order to learn a lot about myself, and one was a community college that helped me figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

Each one of those schools helped make me who I am today - I'm thankful for that.
But the one side effect of all of this switching around is that friendships are really hard to hang on to, especially those from before the days of facebook. Every time I switched schools I was in a completely new group of friends, which meant I lost touch with the old ones. It was just too much to keep up with. On the plus side, I became very comfortable with being "the new girl," which is a good skill to have when you have a chronic case of the transfers.

Thankfully for my sanity, however, there is one group of friends that I spent years growing up with, and that is the girls from the barn where we grew up riding together. We all started young and went through everything together. No one understands the misery of a bad show or the frustration of a bad lesson, as well as the highs of a good one, as well as the girls who have been there with you from the beginning of all of it. When you are so upset that you want to give up they are the reason that you stick through. You spend hours and hours together, getting up early to travel to shows and cheering each other on in competitions. Riding isn't really a team sport in the strictest sense but you do develop a bond with each other.

Now that we are all older it is a lot harder to get together; a lot of girls aren't in town as often anymore, and those that are just don't have the time to ride as much as they'd like. But for the last few years we have gotten together over Thanksgiving and gone for a ride. It's like we're 12 years old again, cantering around Calais field, gossiping about boys, the best of friends. I look forward to it every year.