It’s the season of reunions: high school reunions, college reunions, and family reunions. Time to visit with family members we miss, love, cherish, and with whom we agree to disagree; and to reconnect with lifelong friends we haven’t see in weeks, months or years. I recently experienced my 45th Wellesley College Reunion held Memorial Day Weekend.
Each Wellesley College Class is assigned the color green, purple, red or yellow. Our Class of 1979 is assigned the color bright yellow. A group of 12 of us Class of 1979 alumnae, SisterDivas who have Zoomed every month since April 2020, gathered on the Wellesley College campus (located 35 minutes west of Boston), where we first met at ages 16, 17 and 18 nearly 5 decades ago. This group is spread all over the country, hailing from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. It was so very important to each one of us to greet each other in person – most of us haven’t seen each other in person since our previous Reunion in 2019 – that we happily traveled by car, plane and train to arrive on Friday, May 24, 2024. As the first Black President of the Class of 1979, a 5-year term for which I was elected, 2019-2024 has been an extraordinary period of rewarding, mutually beneficial experiences.
Oh, the indescribable JOY to have such a golden opportunity to spend quality time with my classmates from around the world! We’ve lost several classmates since 2019. Such deaths have created a series of deep holes in our hearts, requiring each one of us to think more seriously about our mortality; to reassess, reevaluate and reorganize priorities; to communicate intentionally, creatively, and more frequently with the people we care about, and to actually tell them and show them how much we love them.
For convenience, most of us stayed 2 nights in one of the dormitories on campus we shared with the Class of 1969. In uncharacteristically hot, 80-degree weather, we walked, rode in golf carts and mini-vans across the gorgeous campus. We dined, reminisced, laughed together, and Danced our Class Off!
The pinnacle of Reunion is the Alumnae Parade held on Sunday during which classes cheer for each other and stroll through the campus ending at Alumnae Hall. The Class of 1979 showed up and showed out! I’m still basking in the exhilaration of those experiences with my classmates! Photos tell the story.
Blessed abundantly. Taking nothing for granted. Expressing appreciation for each new day. So grateful to be healthy and able to make that trip. It was a weekend of beautiful experiences shared, to be cherished always and forever.
May you experience life’s many blessings during this season of reunions.
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