i thank my friend

Lily and Bryce sitting on our front step the day the Hale family moved.

We talked about it happening someday. We discussed support systems, family and the like. We also shared our fears of moving, beginning again. We knew that we couldn’t be neighbors forever, but up until the day they left, I may have naively thought it a possibility.

Let me back up a bit. When Cory and I moved to our neighborhood over seven years ago, I was a lone wolf. We quickly, and happily became a family and suddenly I was a lone wolf with a little cub. I knew the young woman across the street, but not yet personally. I knew she had what appeared to be a 2 year-old and, not long after we moved in, I observed a newborn in her arms when she would walk to the end of the driveway to pick up her mail. In those days I knew how to get to the grocery store, Cory’s office, my work, my parent’s house, and then back again. I was new and not yet connected to the community where we were growing our family. She seemed confident, capable and I was certain she knew her way around town. She had friends too, local friends who seemed to come by often. My friends had to plan weeks ahead for a visit, living over an hour away from me now. When I think back to that time I remember sitting at the kitchen table and watching the world outside. It breathed activity, lives in motion, routines and happenings. I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t lonely, just idle-waiting, unbeknownst to me, for someone to pull me out of the house and teach me how to make a really good sugar cookie.

So, I will count my blessings and call myself lucky for the short six years I got to live across the street from my dearest friend, Tara. We bonded for the first time over sugar cookies and few of our million conversations happened outside of our kitchens. On our watch, we added more children to our families, sadly saw marriages end, but then new ones begin, picked every Ohio fruit available to us, sought parenting advice, watched countless television shows, exercised (quite faithfully for a while there;), shared viruses between us and our kids, shared recipes and lots of good food, dinners out, shopping trips and pedicures, playground dates and babysitting emergencies. We loved and cared for each others children as if they were our own. We embraced our fundamental differences and it made us more tolerant and loving human beings. I think we somehow managed to cover it all, and in a very short amount of time. We decided that things were just getting about perfect when they decided to move 1,700 miles away.

Today I know my way around. I love where we live and have made friends locally, really good people. Cory and I agree that it feels more and more like home every time we return after being away for a while and have vowed to stay here for a very long time. Tara and her family are still a part of my community, just the one that’s in my heart. I can’t run across the street to say hello or to grab an egg, but I can call her up or Face Time whenever I need to, which is most days. We still come home some evenings and I will catch myself glancing across the street and wondering, “Are Ben and Tara home?”…They are, but in a new home, establishing a new community where they are lucky to be surrounded by family and old friends; where those folks are now lucky to have Ben and Tara and their boys closeby.

I miss Tara deeply. Everyday. But for as much as I miss her, I am also overwhelmed by my gratefulness to her for bringing me a plate of sugar cookies that day, for coming into this house and helping to make it feel like home. She is everywhere here and always will be as long as we live in this neighborhood. So, I thank my friend. I thank her for love, support, and a kindness like I might have otherwise never have known. She continues to inspire me from afar to be a better wife, mother, daughter and friend and no amount of distance will ever change that.