Knowing a person

I'm meeting up with university friends for lunch this weekend. I realise we've known each other for over 20 years. Re reading my letters last month, there are many from them. Letters written whilst on holiday, on gap years after university, thank you letters, good luck in new home, sharing the excitement of engagements. Many memories. Our lives are quite different somehow, I don't know about their day to day thoughts and emotions. They're not the friends I would go to in a crisis. But they are friends I've known for a very long time.

'Well, this is one way of knowing a person, I suppose; to know the outline, not the detail; to sit on the veranda and look at the contour of the hill - that shoulder, such a jagged shoulder it looks, running down steeply into the silverwater of the loch. I know Mrs Anstruther in that way - just a few jags, sticking up into the blue sky, just a rounded piece of hill with a few pine trees on it. Some day I may climb the hill and feel the smoothness of the jagged rocks, and find a piece of bog-myrtle in a crevice, or move a stone and see the ants and beetles wriggling amongst the pale roots of grass.' D.E. Stevenson Mrs Tim of the Regiment
socks
Thankfully we no longer need to snuggle by the fire to keep warm as we did in student days. What are your thoughts on friendship over time?