By the time you are reading this, I already will have returned (God willing) from a trip down South to visit dear friends with whom my husband and I get together about once a year.

Together, there are six of us — three couples — who became friends decades ago. New technology — Facebook and group text messages — make it much easier to keep in touch these days, especially when we all live hundreds and hundreds of miles apart. That’s nice, but it’s still no comparison to getting together for what has become an annual reunion tradition. We all have been blessed with our health, the means and the opportunity.

Last year the six of us gathered in Nashville, Tennessee. I had never been there. If you like country music, you really must go!

The year before that, as COVID-19 was winding down, we spent a few days during the peak of fall foliage in a rented house in the mountains of West Virginia. I remember my boss, who grew up in West Virginia, calling it “almost heaven.”

The mountains and the view were truly beautiful, and we did a lot of grilling and playing cornhole.

Coincidentally, both couples recently relocated, so this year we planned to travel south to see both new homes, one in Georgia and one in North Carolina. During the commute in between, once again we all rented a home in the mountains of North Carolina, just to get away.

The beauty of all these trips comes not just from the places or things we see. Yes, every trip is lovely, but the memories come simply from getting together to share stories and laugh a lot with very special friends.

So, this week, I will take time and space to share some simple quotes as a reminder, dear reader, about the value of friendship.

I hope they inspire you to take a few minutes this week to call up a friend, just to say “hi.” It will be time well spent.

• “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” — Henry Ford

• “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.” — Mark Twain

• “True friends are those rare people who come to find you in dark places and lead you back to the light.” — Unknown

• “There is nothing on this Earth more to be prized than true friendship.” — Thomas Aquinas

• “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “A true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your success.” — Doug Larson

• “A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else.” — Len Wein

• “True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.” — David Tyson

• “A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably.” — William Penn

• “When you’ve made a fool of yourself, (a friend) doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.” — Laurence J. Peter

• “The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” — Elisabeth Foley

• “Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” — Muhammad Ali

• “Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.” — Woodrow Wilson

• “True friends are great riches.” — Unknown

• “A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.” — Aristotle