"Retirement must be wonderful. I mean, you can suck in your stomach for only so long." ~ Burt Reynolds

Today, for the first time in 51 years, I am not walking through the front door of school to begin a new school year as either a student or a teacher.  This benchmark comes with some sadness, but mostly with great joy at being able to join my group of teacher friends who are now all retired, with me being the last to complete our circle.  For the past several years their numbers have grown, leaving me to wistfully think of them on their "first day of school lunch outing", while I in turn pointed out where classrooms were located to new and bewildered 7th graders. 

The happiest part of today's outing was to be surrounded by "my people". Those girlfriends with whom I have  laughed and laughed and laughed.  The kind of tears running down your face, and squishing your thighs together laughter.  If studies are to be believed, we will all live longer for it.

Seated at Elderberry Pond Restaurant

For today's lunch, we chose The Restaurant at Elderberry Pond.  A lovely spot outside of Skaneateles, NY.  What a beautiful setting, in spite of the torrential rain and dismal skies.

Cheers - we are all retired!

Finally, a chance to catch up with each other.

The whole "Retired" crew! 

When lunch was done, some of us headed to Anyela's Vineyard.  You can see that we enjoyed ourselves!

Cheers -again!

So unlike the Junior High on the first day of school!

The perfect ending to the first day of school - I really have been waiting for this!

And so I come to this blog.  In addition to my birthday group - those retired teachers with whom I lunched today and gather  monthly to celebrate each other's birthdays - I also have a varied group of friends from those in my book group, to those in a newly formed cooking group, to those in my knitting group. This latter group is filled with one creative and  entrepreneurial woman after another, and if not for them, I wouldn't have really known what a blog was, let alone been inspired or felt brave enough to begin one of my own.  So this post is the first of what I hope will be many more to come.  I hope to share with you the things that are happening in "My Retiring Life".  I guess that we know wine figures in there somewhere!