Friendship

“I never saw an oft-transplanted tree, Nor yet an oft-removed family, That throve so well as those that settled be” -Benjamin Franklin

I read this quote recently, and I find it haunts me. 

There are many advantages to this small place we live. We know the names of the majority of people we meet in the grocery or at the library or at the beach. What strikes me is that I have only known their names for about a year, and they have all known one another much longer. 

This is a little hard for me and leaves me like the unsettled, transplanted tree. I am thriving, but I can feel my own foreign-ness. When I am with more than one of my new friends, I can usually sense their longer history and how I am somewhat out of sync. 

I do not think this is a permanent state. I am most comfortable with old friends, and I have not known anyone in our new place long enough to call them that. I have a strong feeling that some will be friends for the rest of my life; they are quite settled and thriving, and we have no intention of moving again.

On the other hand, even in Texas, I had trouble living near "old friends". And unlike our new town, we had trouble finding a place that seemed so promisingly full people who did not find us odd.

So now we've moved three times in five years, and I hope we're done. I hope the friends I'm making now are for life. I hope I am finally in a place where I'll know the same people year after year, with the peppering of new people along the way.