Friends Kept Apart by Winter Finally Reunite for Brunch

Friends separated for more than two months finally reunited for brunch this Sunday, after having agreed that it was warm enough to make schlepping to a restaurant a not unbearable hassle.

Though the friends—Rachel, Claire, and Diane—had texted each other “brunch tmrw?” on many of the Saturday nights that they spent apart, and these messages had been met with excited, “Yes! It’s been too long” responses, disappointment always followed.

“The last time we made a brunch plan, forty-five minutes before we were supposed to meet, Diane texted that she needed to take a rain check,” Rachel said. “I could have just met up with Claire, but she and I aren’t really one-on-one brunch friends.” Because of this tremendous letdown, Rachel said she didn’t allow herself to get too excited about this weekend’s plan.

She wasn’t alone in her hesitation.

“Honestly, if I really thought that this brunch would happen I wouldn’t have agreed to meet somewhere in Alphabet City,” said Claire, who lives on the Upper West Side and hadn’t realized that she was signing up for a two-subways-plus-a-ten-minute-walk kind of event. “But, you know, it was forty-one degrees outside, so I couldn’t very well cancel.”

The weather was the first topic discussed by the long-lost friends, when, at last, at 12:45 P.M. on Sunday—fifteen minutes after the agreed-upon meeting time, Diane noted—they were seated for their jubilant reunion brunch.

“It’s crazy how forty-one degrees feels outright balmy after the freezing temperatures we’ve been having,” Rachel commented. The others agreed that it was, indeed, crazy.

After initial pleasantries, however, the excitement of seeing each other again was tinged with the bittersweet fact that the time apart had changed them. “All Claire wanted to talk about was ‘House of Cards,’ and Rachel wouldn’t shut up about ‘True Detective,’ ” Diane lamented. “And I don’t get Netflix or HBO.”

“What kind of monster doesn’t get Netflix?” Claire asked.

Rachel agreed that everybody knows someone with an HBO Go password that he or she will share, and that Diane was just being difficult.

With so many weeks of anecdotes and gossip to catch up on, the women found it hard to keep track of what they’d already told each other or shared on social media.

“Diane showed me a picture of her pug, Petunia, that I had liked on Instagram three weeks before,” Rachel complained.

For her part, Diane said that Rachel told a story she’d previously heard, but with significantly more embellishments than in the last telling.

The trio ended their reunion with the promise of a follow-up brunch in a few weeks, this time somewhere near Rachel, in Astoria.

“There’s no way I’m going to Queens,” Diane divulged. “But all four of my weather apps told me that it would get miserably cold again, so I figured I might as well get points for being willing to compromise.”

With the weather having now, as forecast, dipped back below freezing, the friends are resigned to going another month or so without seeing each other.

When asked who would be the first to attempt to make the next brunch plan, Rachel said, “Eh, we all have to go to a wedding in North Carolina in May. I’ll just wait to see them then.”

Photograph by Carolyn Taylor/Getty.