Making friends

I've begun to feel more at home here in the south and I think it's because I've finally made some new friends. I still have all my old friends back in Michigan, still write to them as often as I can, still plan on visiting when I make it back north, but there's nothing like having a girlfriend available for a cup of coffee and a good talk every now and then. That had been missing until just recently.

It was hard after we moved. I wasn't quite prepared for how isolated it would feel to be plopped down 1800 miles away from everything I knew. A friend who recently relocated from Colorado to Arizona said it was like "moving to Mars," and it was. I thought a little thing like a two-day drive wouldn't be such a big deal. I could always send pictures via email or chat with people online. And there was a Wal-mart on every corner down here, just like everywhere else. But it was weird. People talked differently. I had to keep asking my neighbor to repeat herself, tried faking comprehension a couple of times and then one day I broke down and asked her what some of her phrases actually meant. She didn't know either.

I recognized that I was lonely and, remembering what I had done when I first moved to Ludington, I called the Jacksonville Chamber and was shocked to discover that it was going to be a lot more expensive to become one with the local business community than it had been in my old home town. Truthfully, half the fun of going to the meetings in Ludington was sitting at a table with someone you knew. It was never about networking, unless you counted yakking with friends as networking.

In desperation I joined a health club. This worked a little better. At least I was around women for an hour a day. Unfortunately, we spent so much effort trying to hear the authoritative voice from the speakers telling us when to change stations that there was very little concentration left over for plain old girl talk.

I started to wonder if I wasn't doomed to be friendless in Florida. Maybe I'd already used up my quota for friends according to some universal scorecard. Maybe I just sucked as a friend and it was obvious to everyone but me. Or maybe I was just out of practice at finding friends. It had been a while since I'd had to start from scratch.

I thought about the first friend I ever had, a girl in kindergarten who drew square-butted horses with curly tails and Egyptian eyes. I began to draw horses like hers and that made us friends until someone stole my friend's affections by adding bows and ribbons to her own horse drawings. I could've drawn bows and ribbons too, but it wasn't something that made any sense to me as an artist. How did the ribbon get there? Horses can't put ribbons in their own manes. Where's the person putting in the bow and how would you draw him or her? While I was trying to figure out the repercussions of tail and mane adornment, my friend drifted away from me. The obvious lesson here was that friendship was fleeting, something I already knew. Or maybe it was that sometimes you just have to accept people as they are and not expect them to always make sense.

But lately things are looking up on the friendship front. I joined a homeschooling group back in August so once a week I'm surrounded by people as crazy about their children as I am about mine. I also have nodding acquaintances who I see nearly every day when I'm walking my dog. Admittedly I know more of the dogs' names than the humans who are with them, but we wave companionably to each other while determinedly keeping our animals on our own side of the street.

This past September I met a woman who has similar interests as me. She's homeschooling a daughter about my youngest son's age, and she likes to write but wishes she had more time to do it. Last month she passed along the location of a really great thrift store. I knew then that we were destined to become close. You know you have someone's trust when they declare out loud that old jewelry is the only kind worth wearing, that the pretty towel and candle holder in their kitchen used to be a gun rack, and that they're a sucker for sequined sweater sets for $4.99.

This new friend and I meet every full moon now for a "Beach Session" at a local park south of town. We bring folding chairs and hot tea and the latest updates on our children and husbands. The updating part can last several hours. Then we take out our flashlights and we read each other something we've written ourselves. It's my favorite part of the night, sharing a creative effort with a kindred spirit to the sound of the surf in front of us. I think about how the moon over our heads is shining on Ludington, too, and then home doesn't feel so far away. It's right here, with my friend.