It's More Than Dinner (Lindsay)

Fair warning: This post will be a bit nostalgic so if you're in a sarcastic mood tonight, drink some wine and resume reading when you're a bit tipsy.  It's been a little over two weeks since my last day of work - a period of time that would have been a long vacation in any of the previous years but what is, this time around, just the beginning. 

It's been an interesting conversion moving from "oh, I have a few days off from work" where I continuously checked my phone for an emergency work call to "hmm, what a nice vacation we're on" to where I've fallen today; "wow, I have many more months to keep doing this". 

But one of the nicest side effects to this new lifestyle (aside from the time spent outside, the many hours of sleep and the new sunburn) is a feeling of community.  We deliberately started in the Northeast in order to try out our new lifestyle in a familiar landscape and to schedule our trips around a few celebrations of weddings and new babies.  What I was not prepared for is the amount of energy I would get from seeing such a range of people.  As a fierce introvert (more on that in a future blog), I receive the majority of my energy when I spend time alone so after a week of work (where I'm forced to flex those extrovert muscles over and over again for the good of the cause), I would spend most of my down time alone in the woods or with Mr. Introvert leaving little motivation to reach out to friends and family who I deeply missed. 

But now that my introverted cup is spilling over, it seems I'm actually looking forward to all these random visits and play dates because I finally have the energy to meet them with the respect they deserve.  In the past week, I've reconnected with friends I haven't seen in months or even years in that magical "it just happened, we didn't need to really make plans" kind of way.  Dinners, hiking, camping, beach burning with people who fill my time with laughter and thoughtful conversation. 

While I am also looking forward to the day where we venture out of the safe womb of the Northeast and are suddenly at the mercy of strangers (a phenomenon I love about traveling), I will revel in the familiar and ability to reconnect with long-time friends and in communities I already know my way around.  A farmer's field in the Monadnock area, a favorite mountain in the Whites, a beloved beach in Maine and a Northern NH community whose newspaper still makes me cringe but whose people I adore - and I'll take pieces of each to keep me calm when we're completely lost in North Dakota and the truck camper is stuck under a short bridge.

"Something had happened which was not noticed by anyone,

but which was more important than all that had been exposed to view"

Leo Tolstoy