Our husbands think it's all pillow fights in our underwear

So I spent the week-end with six other women at a cottage. As far as I can recall, the same core group of us have done this in the fall for four or five years. Sometimes someone can't make it, but this time all seven of us who have ever come were there.

It's a pretty good cross-section of late-thirties, early-forties women. Two of us are divorced and happily remarried. One is unmarried and childless (by choice). Four of us have two or three kids roughly the same ages, one has a one-year-old, and one is pregnant. We work full-time, part-time, have just gone back to work and, uh, then there's me. Several of us wrestle with depression, anxiety and other issues and the attendant fun-with-medication on a regular basis.

We have lunch and go shopping in Westport and Newboro. There's this insane store called Kilborn's that's kind of like the Tardis - bigger inside than outside. It looks like nothing, and then you walk in and it's a complete shoe store, a complete women's clothing store, a complete kitchen store - they actually cook stuff -  a complete wacky-shit-you-don't-find-anywhere-else store, plus hot sauce. There was a live band in there on Saturday, which Collette didn't believe us about because she was there for an hour and a half and never heard them.

Then we go back to the cottage and drink have dinner and eat junk food and play Cranium. We couldn't do any of the sculptorades questions this time because all of the clay containers were empty. Cynthia displayed crazy pregnancy telepathy for much of the first game - Margot would draw one line and Cynthia would yell "Edward the Sixth!" and be right. In the second game when I was Collette's partner she made me do all the spelling for the Word Worm category even though after 'fahrenheit' I made a dismal showing (it's hard spelling words without writing them down - anyone could forget that 'millennium' has a double n under those circumstances, that's what I'm telling myself). I learned another word I didn't know - 'crapulous', which apparently means hung-over, from the Latin crapula (seriously). Susanne and I guessed the wrong definition.

It's a good week-end. I think it's good for the soul to laugh until you can't breathe over how badly someone draws a sea kayak paddle or tries to hum 'That's Amore' or says 'mountain chair lift' when they mean 'musical chairs'. And to flop down on a couple of couches and, when someone says 'tell me all your deepest darkest secrets', look around at each other and realize we all know them already, and we're still friends.