A dear friend of mine is moving. This doesn’t sound terrible, but where we live, not many people move away. Our community is tight knit and we all know each other. A lot of us now have teens and some in college. We’ve been here a while and the roots are starting to grow deep. In fact, I cannot remember the last time a friend of mine moved away.
Sirskatesalot and I landed here by sheer luck. We had only 48 hours to buy a house, not a ton of dough and we wanted our kids in good neighborhood schools. This was the only house that met our requirements and boy, it was not pretty. In fact, I sat on the porch and cried when the movers were moving our stuff in. I could not believe we had bought such a heap and I was overwhelmed with the freeways, the noise, police helicopters…I hated it.
We have now been here a decade. Wow, that is a long time. Most of our kids’ lives. This is all they know. We have dear friends. We are entrenched, in a good way. Our house is not so much a heap anymore, the freeways are not intimidating, and the beach is a stone’s throw away. Did I mention we have dear friends? We are a community. We take care of each other. We eek out time to have fun. It’s actually surprising how much fun you can have when you are middle aged and boring.
We laugh at memories and current realities. We know each other’s quirks, we suffer through most of them and we embrace a lot of them. We even embrace our friends’ children’s quirks most of the time (ahem, this puts us up there with Mother Teresa if you know what I mean). Our friend who is moving away will be sorely missed. She is a riot. There will be a hole here without her. She is so awesome, though, that her new home will embrace her and she will become entrenched, but she’ll also gain an accent, big hair and a lot more make-up. Any guesses where she is going to land? I can only utter a weak, “Yeehaw” because I want her to stay.
bossybostwick 