For days I have been staring at the photo, pinching and pulling the screen on my cell phone, zooming in and zooming out to get a better look at the details. There are actually several different versions, the arrival of each one having been announced by a faint ting, like the ring of a small bell or the tap of a teaspoon on a teacup.

There are 10 of us in the photos. We have known each other since plastic barrettes held our hair out of our faces while we played chase and dangled from monkey bars. We have known each other since we smiled for school pictures without the least hesitation, unworried by things like teeth not yet straightened by braces. We have known each since the future was a concept we understood only as the place where the Jetsons lived.

We have known each other through the anxiety of adolescence and the years when we thought we were adults and were, in reality, anything but. We have known each other through relationships that lasted and those that didn’t. We have known each other through 9-11 and COVID and 17 presidential elections.

We have been bridesmaids and godmothers. We have sat with each other in waiting rooms and funeral home parlors, on decks and pews, through moments of such joy that it felt as though our hearts might explode and through moments of such fear and grief that it felt as though our hearts might collapse.

And, somehow, in an amalgamation of providence and blind luck, we have remained friends. So, in this, the year of our 70th birthdays, we gathered for a birthday party. To sing to ourselves, to wish ourselves a happy birthday, to share a meal on China plates around a table decorated with flowers from Sally’s granddaughter’s garden. To be reminded how fortunate we were and how fortunate we remain to be friends.

After weeks of dry heat, it rained the morning of the party, enough to turn the world the shade of green that always makes me think I’ve walked into a box of Crayola 64. The grass was left dotted with tiny droplets that, in humidity thick as pudding, clung to our shoes as we crossed the yard to the spot where Sally’s daughter-in-law, who has a good camera and an eye for balance and scale, would take the photos.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but nobody adopted the sorority squat. Nobody suggested that we turn sideways to create an allusion that we still wear the same size we bought from Casual Corner. Nobody reapplied lipstick.

What we did do was stand close and smile and, when Carole suggested that we hold hands, we did it, with no hesitation and no awkwardness and so much palpable love that it is no wonder that we all, every last one of us, look beautiful. Because, of course, we are.

It takes time to learn such things. It takes looking in the mirror every morning for decades, watching the lines appear at the corners of your eyes and understanding that each one was earned. It takes remembering that some of our friends, some of the girls and boys we know from the playgrounds and ballfields and slumber parties, didn’t get the privilege of a 70th birthday party. It takes discovering that there is nothing quite as endearing as a well-loved face.