Hags Come Visiting

What They Call Fun Might Extend Their Lives

Those women in the above photo are some special folks. They represent about half of a group of women who call themselves the Hags. From left to right: Scooter, Terri, Peggy (in front,) Tina (middle,) Janet (my wife,) Laurie (hat and sunglasses,) and Monster.

I expected more dancing in my life, though not in my garden. I knew we’d stay up late drinking, telling stories, and laughing. I anticipated the guitar and lovely voices during dinner duties.

The self-described Hags, friends of ours since we met in college in the 1980s, have been gathering for more than 25 years across the west, and my wife, Janet, and I knew that these “fun hogs” would bring a week of joy to our western Massachusetts home when we invited them in the summer of 2018.

What I did not anticipate when we cleared away the beer cans and drove the last few to Logan International Airport was that these women, who first met on an Ultimate field among the Redwood trees of a far northern California university campus, may have presented all of us a way to live longer and be happier doing it.

Days after these women and their spouses and boyfriends left, I still felt as if I was on vacation, more willing to forgive, more grateful, more alert to my neighbors. It could have been the left-over feelings of having friends visit, a hang-over of the best kind.

But researchers say that what these women do naturally — connect, talk, bond despite the distance of years and miles — can improve the lives of people who are part of them. And now making deep friendship groups is…