I am blessed with friends.  So very, very rich in friendships going all the way back to early elementary where I still keep in touch with friends from the old neighborhood.  I collect friends along the way.  Cherish them.  Keep in touch.  It’s why I send so many Christmas cards and the dang post office sure keeps me saving my pennies so I can continue to do so.

Friendships have many seasons though.

Right now I am in a dry season.  We are in a dry season.  Not to say we are out of friends, but merely because life is so busy.  Everyone.  So. Busy.  We are just in a season in our life where our kids keep us rockin’ and rollin’ and that’s not going to stop anytime soon and guess what?  Our friends.   They’re in the same season.  With their kids.

Of course, we live 4-7 hours from our dearest friends and so I think sometimes we just feel it more acutely.  The friends we have here are nice, but so very different in beliefs and seasons in life than we are and so it puts us in a weird place.

Someone once told me that the friends you make when your children are very young are friends for life.  I agree.  I just wish we weren’t so dang spread out.  That we would get more visitors.  That money wasn’t always an issue and we could go nilly willy and visit whoever and whenever we pleased.  That life would slow down a little.  But then, that IS life isn’t it?  Always ebb and flow. Change and change again.  It’s the way it is.

I’ll likely take a trip north in a couple of weeks to visit friends and hope to get in a maximum number of hugs and chats in my always too short trip.  I’m scheduled to shoot across to the state another weekend to have some one-on-one with an old friend.  It’s all good.  I’ll take what I can get, when I can get it and soak it in.