Rain And Friendship

 The rainy season is winding down now, just a month or so less of this cooler time of year and I can already tell it is warming up. The flowers are starting to open here and there and the back yard edges are a riot of green weeds. I don't know what anything is because I am in such an unfamiliar world out here so every little lime green vine or fistfull of invasive plant material looks promising and exotic to me. This spring will be a wild bashing bar-fight of a gardening season. I am not pulling much of anything out and I am so excited to put my garden in that I am sure to follow my usual plan of putting more in the ground than is practical or diplomatic. It will be a wild, chaotic mess of growing and choking and overgrowing and learning. I'm so excited about it all. Here's to the weeds and the learning and the hilarious errors and the brilliance of knowing more about what in the world grows here.

 I am so excited about making friends. This is my current project for the month. I am pushing myself to make dates with people, to reply to emails, to set up playdates (how I hate the term!) for the kids and to go out on the weekends for little lady getaways in the evenings. I am hungry for the connections, the roots, the deeply tapped lines that pull us in when things are dicey and send up their macrame'd message of security and belonging and sense-of-self and sense-of-other. The boys are easy to tip into melancholic and self-pitying wallows about nobody liking them and how they've never had friends. We need to belong and to have "folks," we're all hungry for being missed and having people light up when they see up and for knowing there are people who we have to update about the latest exciting happenings in our day to day. Its a weird feeling to have a lot of people you can small talk with at anytime but no real spot for letting your hair down, talking deep or hearing true vulnerability with others.

 I am so glad I have family during this transition and that I have technology. I need to rely less on Facebook (refresh refresh refresh refresh) and more on my own energy to call people on the phone, actual letters and building the real relationships in brick and mortar here. I slide into the Internet when I feel lonely. I think it feels like a safe place to hide and it is a place where I can find people and connection. That's not all bad, its just that I use it for a shield instead of as a break or a spring-board. I have been eyeing up a women's book study and am not really connected enough to any church yet to find  a group to connect to but I decided to just order the book and try to bootstrap a group based on who I know right now. When you can't beat 'em, lead 'em! That's my technique this time. Never really tried anything like that before. We'll see how it goes.