Can I get real with you for a few minutes?

One of the disappointments that Ava and I have felt since moving to South Carolina,

we moved here at the end of 2020, so we've been here now coming up on three years.

One of the disappointments that both of us are feeling is the lack of deep friendships.

We knew that when we moved from Maryland to South Carolina, we were essentially in many

ways starting over.

We were not moving down here with already a network of people that we knew, that we were close with,

but we needed to create and form some close friendships here in South Carolina.

Neither one of us believed that that was going to be easy or was going to happen quickly,

but we did believe it was going to happen.

Well, here we are now, coming up on three years, neither one of us can point to this group of close friends that we've developed down here.

Part of that is because of circumstances. Right after we moved,

Eva was in the accident, and so for months the focus was on recovering from that. And then she had the

illness last fall that extended into this year with the surgery and the recovery from that.

So there have been a couple of significant speed bumps to finding and building these close relationships.

And we're both still optimistic that this is going to happen, but one of the phrases that

I keep returning to, as we're talking about the relationships that we had in Maryland, that we still have with people who are in other parts of the country,

and the relationships that we are building here that haven't

quite reached this level yet.

The phrase that I keep coming back to is people that I'm doing life with.

That's really the benchmark.

It's not just simply about a friendship here and a friendship there.

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