23 years later

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We had such a lovely time visiting with Jim and his mom after all these years apart.

Jim and I became friends right at the start of college and were besties all the way through. I’ve talked about him before in this post because he cycled 102 miles to raise money for cancer research last year. But let me be plain about how lucky I feel to have met and claimed Jim as my best friend in that really vulnerable first week of freshman year: I won the friendship lottery! There, I said it.

Historically, one of the most popular weekends of the year at Ohio University is Moms Weekend. That first photo in my layout is a shot I took of Jim and his mother and my brother and our mother during Moms Weekend in our senior year (1989). We all had a great time hanging out together that weekend. Now fast forward 23 years to the second photo, taken this past summer when the five of us met up for the first time since the other photo—23 years later! We had an amazing day together, full of laughter, and it was so overdue.

Now to illuminate any non-scrapbook folk out there reading this: Scrapbookers are almost always using part of their brains on scrapbook thoughts. In this case, once I knew that Phil, Mom and I were going to drive to Virginia to meet up with Jim and his mom, the first thing I thought to do was pull out this old photo, scan and color correct it and then print it to take along. Why? So I could set up the same shot and then scrapbook them together, of course. And give Jim the photo to take home.

And that’s what I did. The problem was that I forgot about taking this photo until we were walking Jim and his mom through a pedestrian overpass and back to their hotel for the night. It didn’t turn out to be the awesome photo I envisioned, but I came home with the shot and the wonderful memories, and that’s what really mattered.

I’m entering this layout in the My Mind’s Eye October challenge (incorporate stamping into your project).