Out of the Pumpkin Shell by Nancy Werking Poling

Love stories. The teaching careers of lifelong friends Harriet (Hat) and Elise have come to an end in spectacular style, with the two women leaving more than burning bridges behind them. Now they are looking menopause straight in the eye-and they don't care one bit for what they see. Fight, they vow, we'll fight the interloper tooth and nail. For both friends the journey to Bryson's Mill becomes a pilgrimage of a different kind: into the past lives of women, into truth, into sisterhood, and most of all, into new possibility. Lesbian fiction.