They’re over here on the sofa passed out in their prom dresses.

My friend Molly’s observation came in her familiar silken contralto voice at the other end of the phone line, and made me giggle. It was time to go retrieve my toddler from an afternoon play date with hers just a few blocks away, and it sure sounded like it had been a good one. Never mind mine was a boy-toddler and hers was a girl. When in Rome. He was always content to go with the flow.

When I arrived to fetch him, I mentioned I how much I enjoyed the imagery. She quipped, Fifteen years from now, I’ll probably still be calling you to let you know they’re over here on the sofa passed out in their prom dresses.

There were others from that same life chapter but in a narrower orbit, the innermost concentric circle, with whom I and my family—my first husband and my son—were deeply connected. In common parlance you’d call them ‘framily’—the people with whom you share no DNA at all but whom you trust as much or even more than you do certain members of your genetic family. They are people who understand you better than you do yourself. If you have them in your life right now, hang onto them tight, for they are precious.

At a golden moment in my past there were two such framilies. We all lived in the same venerable historic Knoxville neighborhood. We had children of roughly the same age, who at various times attended school and church together. Of greater consequence, we shared our lives together outside these institutions. These occasions often found us convened at one of our homes, in rotation.

One of them lived down the road from us in a single-story Prairie-style home Frank Lloyd Wright himself might have designed; it was of modest size but with classic details and well-appointed within. The kids always retreated to the family room to engage in whatever avocation held their sway at the moment. Dance Dance Revolution was a thing in those days, any iteration of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, and all manner of art projects. There was a chapter when making duct tape into everyday objects engaged them for long hours.

The other of them lived down the road from us in a different direction, in a Tudor Revival-style home not unlike ours, of the same early twentieth-century vintage. It was here the kids often stepped into an amped-up audio-visual experience courtesy of one of our hosts whose work in television made this possible. Meanwhile the grownups gathered upstairs in what had been an unfinished attic, now tastefully deployed as an exquisite living space worthy of a decorator magazine, with a sun-drenched artist’s alcove at one end, a comfortable living and dining space in the center, and a ‘treehouse’-style loft made specifically for their daughter to play; sometimes all the kids climbed up into it to hang out while we sat below them and luxuriated in food and drink like a close-knit family does.

At our house the draw was a heated pool, but the sunny yellow playroom upstairs sufficed in foul weather.

The other thing that happened during family dinner night was adult conversation. It was natural for the kids to head to one end of the house (often instantly after arriving, in a flurry of excitement) and adults to the other, and much needed for our collective sanity. Dinner sometimes brought us together, balanced on knees or seated around multiple tables, inside or outdoors in the changing seasons. Sometimes stringed instruments came out for spontaneous picking and grinning.

We were all of us the beneficiaries of these magical years. But as often as one of us predicted our kids would find themselves one day at each other’s wedding rehearsal dinners as adults, and as much as we wanted to believe this narrative, it never unfolded that way. Still, each of our children has grown into settled adult lives of their own, and one wants to believe that our families, individually and collectively, played a consequential role in this healthy and desirable outcome.

The road there is never paved with smooth stones. Another truth: Tragedy reveals your true friends. When our child was given the boot from the school we helped found, just three weeks before the end of fourth grade, these families were there for us with outstretched hands and a lifeline when others were not. We felt no malice from other friends, just the roar of silence. Lots of ‘decline’ responses to birthday party invitations, kind of thing. I think sometimes it’s just hard for people to wrap their heads around the magnitude of an event like expulsion, one of the most overt expressions of rejection. Maybe they can’t put themselves fully in your shoes. Maybe they don’t know what to say or do, so they just check out.

Several years later when my marriage failed, right on cue these good people were there again to hold me in a tight, tight embrace (me, but not my husband, after his serial indiscretions) while I came unglued. The last night I spent in my own family’s home, my boy was there with me and we slept on the hardwood floor, on towels. The next day we climbed into my Subaru and drove together to Vermont, so he could see for himself where I would start my next chapter, alone, before I put him on a plane home to his dad.

How I wish you knew these people, I said on repeat in the early years with my beloved David. He finally did meet them—one family on a chance encounter in downtown Knoxville when we were visiting, and the other for a planned dinner. At last I could introduce my best friend in the world now, to my best friends in the world then. It was the next best thing to time travel.

In a recurring fantasy, David and I return to Knoxville, the city that is my birthright, and I, we, pick up where I left off in 2012. This is folly. The reality there now is a void where once was a tightly knit community of precious friends. We have all of us, at least within the first two or so concentric rings, scattered to far corners of the country, every single one of us. Nothing is the same, and we can never go home.

If you have these people in your life right now, hang onto them tight, for they are precious.