Members don't seek the limelight but celebrate themselves in giving back.
We have many circles of friends and they often interlock and overlap. But every month, one particular circle of my friends meets to continue a tradition that is 115 years old. We are members of a club.
We break bread together (actually, we eat fruit, veggies, cookies and cakes), plan parties, organize tag sales, distribute to important organizations funds that we have raised at craft fairs and auctions, listen to speakers who range from our Valley’s well- known (Elinor Lipman, Barry Moser) and emerging authors and artists to nutritionists, motivation leaders, and financial advisors, and enjoy the benefits of working together to make things happen in our community.
This year, we organized a first ever New Year’s Eve town dance that attracted a full house of people from surrounding communities who danced until the clock struck midnight, and then we met on New Year’s Day and cleaned up the hall, groggy, happy and sure that nibbling the cookies that one of us brought would help our sore muscles heal.
This year, like every year, we will give scholarships to graduates of our schools and organize a gigantic tag sale where bags of clothes go for $2 -“stuff it as full as you can!” we say - and give the remaining items to shelters, always saving some of the really “good” stuff for those deliveries.
We will sew pillowcases - 10 of us at sewing machines and ironing boards, can you imagine? We sew together like women did decades ago, channeling our mothers and grandmothers, so that a terminally-ill child will be able to lay his or her head down on a flowery or frog-printed pillowcase, that someone - one of us!- has made with love and care.
We are members of the South Deerfield Women’s Club, and while 80 of us pay dues, a core of about 25 are regular meeting attendees. And that’s where things start, just as they have since 1897 when a group of local women organized to “promote the intellectual and social life of its members and to contribute to the welfare of the community.”
And while we do wonderful things together as a Club, we have spun our club interests into many circles of friends. Some of us call each other for comfort when our dogs are sick, our children are going through a rough patch, or our parents are failing and we need someone to listen as we sort things out.
We walk the streets of old Deerfield, the cornfields behind it, and the tough steep trail up Sugarloaf Mountain, for exercise, we say, but mostly to be together as the seasons turn and our lives change.
We get together in our fancy clothes because our kids are getting married; put on our grungies and wear silly hats at hockey games because one of our husbands is a year older and we’re going to celebrate it his way; or we keep our pj’s on and gather around a kitchen table with wine and brownies because our day has been awful or just because we need a girlfriend fix.
Some of us go to movies and drool over Tom Cruise then argue if he is better looking than Brad Pitt; some of us go to the Cape and stand in the bay at sunrise and take photos of ourselves, still bathing beauties, in the gold and apricot light of a new day; a few of us make decorations for another friend’s baby shower while others of us pin the fluffy tulle and paper balls to a friend’s living room ceiling and arrange the table where the baby gifts will go just so; two of us go to a rock concert; a different two of us listen to a capella at Smith each year in Northampton.
We go to one friend’s house to watch the Academy Awards- just us girls; and to another’s for Super Bowl- with the guys; to another’s for a Christmas hoodoo, and another’s for a pool party on the 4th of July.
We are fluid and malleable in the composition of our circles, women coming into the flows and eddies of friendships, and sliding out of them, sometimes to return, sometimes not, as natural and beautiful and sometimes as sad and sentimental as the river of life itself.
We can’t decide whether we want to get together for a photo to accompany a story about our friendships because we don’t want to leave anyone out, don’t want to hurt feelings, reasoning that all of the women who have been a part of our many circles over the years are meaningful to us or have been, and in the way that things go, we all know that maybe they will be back, and a part of us, again.
So we decide to talk about our circle of friends, but not to name our names or show our faces in photos, because our friendships are not about us shouting to the world, they are about us and who we are to each other. Precious, funny, sustaining and changing.