Staying in touch

I don't really have a best friend. I have some close friends but almost all of them have close friends that are probably closer than me. I always love the movies that have a group of girls that have known each other forever (usually childhood) and have stayed in touch and grown even closer over the years. I think I love these movies most because they have something that I don't. Something that I have longed and yearned for as long as I can remember.

Friends from my childhood changed every few years. I was my own person so I jumped from group to group depending on what phase I was going through. I didn't like a lot of the people I went to high school with so I became friends with kids from other schools instead. In college I left high school in the wind and continued to meet new people and make new friends. One of my college roommates and I have stayed close and if we lived closer I think we would continue to grow in our friendship. We kind of do a good job staying in touch for a while and then lose touch for a while. The good part is that we always pick up right where we left off.

Bret and I met our freshman year in college. He was kind of a wanderer when it came to friends his whole life too. Although living in a small town limited the number of groups he could jump from he managed to spread his time out pretty well. Both of us always felt (and still feel) a sense of missing something because we didn't have that family (since we look for family friends cause it makes it easier now) that we did everything with. We had that for a flash when we lived in Wichita. I keep wanting us to move back there hoping that we can rekindle what we have had for such a short time.

Sometimes I think about what it will be like when we leave PA. Regardless of where we move to when Bret is done I know that it would be very unlikely for us to make a trip back to PA. We have made friends here but like the many friends we have made over the course of our lives I wonder how many of them we will actually put forth the effort (on their part or ours) to stay in touch and stay connected. Our Christmas card list has expanded and so have our friends count on Facebook but otherwise I don't see many people making trips to see us or us to see them.

We still have a few years left in PA and a lot can happen in a few years. I miss our friends back home. I miss the girls nights out, late night scrapbooking, or even just the gossip gathering on the front porch. I miss Bret's enjoyment of hanging with the guys whether is was poker or playstation. I miss making fun of him because he and his best bud were on the outs over Madden just to hear the phone ring the next morning at the crack of dawn to hear the two make up like school girls.

I have never wanted to wish our lives away but sometimes I wish that the next two years would fly by so we can move home. We go back to KS in two weeks and I don't know who is more excited, us (Bret, me, and the kids), our parents, or our friends.