By Sonya Zalubowski

 

That blurry black and white picture from so long ago — I am standing on a chair in an A-line skirt with the bunched hem held up by a few pins.

 

 

Decades have passed since that photo, probably from Peg's Instamatic camera. Don't recall ever even seeing the picture before. Don't know who was measuring to make sure that hem was even.  Peg has brought a handful of such photos along to share with the rest of us, back for the first time all together again since graduation in 1965 at our alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Peg and Sue,  Shari and I.  (Shari actually graduated the year before us, but joined us for this 50th alumni weekend since so much of our life on campus had been spent together).

That picture at our dorm, Slichter Hall.  It records our enthusiasm when we discovered we could make our own A-line skirts. Don't know where we got the sewing machine but we could have this richness, an entire wardrobe of A-line skirts for so little money, just the cost of material and our own efforts.

 

The memories flood back. Here we are all together again, only now we all have at least some white hair and wrinkles. A blustery fall day for the alumni reunion. I had forgotten how we were back then so long ago.  We were a pack.

And now we were once again.  For one rollicking fall weekend, in the same place where all our hopes and dreams were hatched nearly a lifetime ago. Somehow, the combination worked its original magic and we were able down the long halls of time, to reach back and touch the girls we had once been.

 

I get ahead of myself.  Back to the old photos, that one with the skirt.  I am wearing a Norwegian print sweater, machine-made but my pride and joy. Doesn't go at all with the cotton A-line skirt.  Me with thick darker hair, short and somehow curly before the rest of a lifetime of a bob and straight hair.

 

More pictures, that was how my hair was ... curly. A girl with a bonnet hair dryer,  one of the triumvirate of true prizes in the dorms along with a popcorn popper and a typewriter.  No cellphones,  iPads, laptops or television sets.  We all shared one phone on our floor and you were lucky to have a record player and alarm clock.  I remember the pain, if you didn't have a hair dryer,  brush rollers poking your head all night long while you tried to sleep.

Like I said, we were a pack. Photos of us everywhere, striking model-like poses next to a tree, girls on the verge of emergence as young women.  Dreamy with so much future ahead of us.

 

For me, my first time away from home except for a short stint at summer camp. For the first time, I was finding myself without family and all the duties associated with caring for a much younger brother and chores for a working mom and dad. No comparisons like before with an older sister. No nights of babysitting.  The feeling of freedom, all these new friends to make. Both Shari and I had to reform by second semester after our grades suffered from too much socializing.

 

And now we were back, each of us traveling from afar, me the farthest, the West Coast.   We jump up and down in the hallway at our hotel, the Lowell Center, a former lady's dorm. Causing a ruckus of noise and squeals of delight at seeing each other after so many years. Sue from Minneapolis, a retired social worker. Shari, a Ph.D. in psychology still working in Pittsburgh. Peg, a retired elementary school teacher from a small town near Philadelphia. And me, a retired journalist from Vancouver, Wa.