With fronds like these...

Staying in touch is hard. And I'm counting tweets and status updates. It's still rough. You really have to work to keep a friendship current and lively.

When you first get to college you'll keep in random touch with select friends from your hometown. Talking about parties or classes or how awesome (!) that football game was last week. Gradually, though as the semester ticks on you lose touch. With each class and encounter you scramble to hastily make friends with anyone, desperate to gain entry into some imagined crowd of incessant glory. New friends come into the picture and the farthest away they'll ever be is across campus on the top floor. And then winter break comes and you go home and you probably be able to schedule a get together or two with your dearest friends from grade school. But the people you'll probably see the most at home are the folks you thought you said goodbye a long time ago to. And that's how it will be every time you go home. Forever. And that group of people you have to engage in awkward contact with will grow. Forever. And you'll have to create a great profile of job, hottie significant other, and baller attitude or people will think you've failed. Forever. Growing up is fun!

Spring semester comes and you continue to meet new people at college. Of the friends you made in the first few weeks after move-in you'll have weeded out the ones that don't quite fit you. And in four years you grow "into yourself" (and who really knows when we're ever done with that), you evolve and the people you keep company with evolve with you. You'll make your great friends whom you trust with you life and plan to have in your wedding party on day. You'll have those friends that happen to be enrolled in the same classes as you and pursue the same major. You'll have club friends, drinking friends, friends that climb on rocks, study friends, muddy friends, even friends with chicken pox. (I'm so very sorry for that. It's hot. My brain is mushy.) And these friends will define you and you'll find yourself wondering how you ever flourished without them.

Okay now I need to stop. I MISS MY FRIENDS! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Back to keeping in touch. You'd think in an era of instant connectivity with e-mail, skype, twitter, and facebook we'd be better at it. But life happens and sending out a mass announcement of success or woe isn't exactly a comfortable thing. Of course, you could call those near and dear to your heart but we never do. And banking on a coincidental visit to the hometown if hopeful but quite a difficult affair. So these dear friends become more like the family members you see on holiday gatherings. I guess that's okay. These people are still very much a part of you, but they've grown as well and have made their own friends that better suit who they are and who they hope to be. And that's okay. It's lovely. It just makes keeping up to date with one another more difficult.

So what do you do? Many of my groups of friends have tried creating an e-mail thread and updating one another every one in awhile. It gets the job done, sure, but it usually dies out pretty darn quickly. We have to make time for one another. Maybe plan a weekend getaway for friends. Aim to settle on a hometown return in advance. When you first see one another again, and it's like old times once more, you'll be so thankful for some planning and for the journey you have been on that you will share with your oldest buddies.

I'm all talk right here, but I have every intention of shooting my lovely friends an e-mail...soon.

Now that I've made myself wistful for people I love and haven't seen in quite awhile I'm going to look at pictures of animal friends. Because I can.

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