I've more or less come to terms with the idea of my friends growing up and getting married around me, which is obviously also an indicator that I'm growing up and will one day be getting married. People keep asking me what it feels like to be graduated from college and right now it just feels like summer vacation: hot, humid, lazy and lots of reading and drinking cold beer on hot porches with my friends. Right now I'm camped out for the morning watching Netflix and reading in a coffee shop across the Mississippi from my house, enjoying AC and doing my best to escape the intensity of the humidity out there.

This past weekend I was up north again for my childhood friend Grace's bridal shower and bachelorette party. As of this coming Saturday she will be married, a reception with the neighborhood will follow the next week, then she'll also be moving to the West Coast (Portland area, which is unfortunately far away from LA). When my friend Deb got married a few months after we graduated from high school, and as I've watched several of my cousins and friends older siblings get married from several different kinds of pews (from Evangelical churches with tin roofs, to ornate Catholic churches, to homemade benches in the forest) I've come to terms over and over again with my own ageing. These realizations usually hit me at either important moments like weddings, or at quiet rituals, like one day at Perpich when I was walking back to my dorm senior year and I realized suddenly that this was my life... that I went to a boarding school and lived in a dormitory.

The bachelorette party was very fun. I won't give details, since these things are usually not something one would talk about afterwards, but I will say it involved going to the 7th Harry Potter movie, eating lots of great food and that only two alcoholic beverages were consumed among the six of us all evening. So it's probably not what you think if your thinking of bachelorette party details not to be shared later.

After Grace's wedding, one of my other good friends Elise will be getting married. We met when I worked at Glensheen, bonded over the Lord of the Rings and the novels we were writing. Since then we've been writing letters to each other and meeting for long lunches and coffees when we're both in Duluth. It's been one of those friendships where spending a lot of time together would probably not be sustainable, but being able to know each other intimately through our letters and having watched the changes both of us went through during our teen years keeps us close to one another in a way I don't usually experience with my friends. She will be getting married just a few weeks after Grace, and I'll be coming home for that wedding too, if all works out well.

In the end it feels like I should make some big bow-tying statement here about growing up and turning into adults and watching it happen to my friends and knowing its happening to me but not feeling it like I thought I would. Well, there you go. There's my statement.