Celebrating Friendship

Photo by Mike Lumpkin

I just came across a favorite quote on the front of a note card: “A friend is someone who knows all about you, and still likes you.” It seems particularly appropriate to me as I have reveled this week in the joys of friendship.


For two wonderful days, Mike and I shared our home with friends of long standing. We shared meals, a drive through the North Carolina mountains, an afternoon boating on the lake and a funny movie. Best of all, we talked about things that really matter to us and we laughed together about the follies of life, including our own foibles.

I shared a well-written newspaper column with friends and got thoughtful responses, including one asking for more information about our son’s impending wedding. Tell me more, she said, and I loved her anew for caring about those I hold closest and most dear.

Later in the day she shared news of another friend and I reconnected with someone else who has known me for decades and still thinks I’m worth knowing and loving. Just thinking of her makes me smile and even as she encouraged my blogging with her kind words, I remembered working on the high school newspaper where my love of writing was encouraged and I recalled so many fun times we all had then.

And so it goes. We find each other at various points in our lives and friendships are forged. Over the years these relationships wax and wane, perhaps, as we follow different paths. We scatter across the country, even across the globe for job opportunities or family changes. But when we come back together, there is still that initial connection that draws us together.

Sometimes our connection is only the memory of when we knew each other first or when we spent time together in the neighborhood, at school or a workplace. If we’re lucky, and I have certainly had more than my share of luck, the connection is re-ignited in reunion and we either pick up where we left off or even refresh the bond and it grows stronger.

In less mature years, I thought of friendship as the bond between people with common interests, similar opinions and probably similar backgrounds. Those common experiences laid the groundwork for two people to create the foundation of a relationship. I’ve learned over time that many of my most treasured friendships are with people whose experiences have been quite different from mine and those differences are sometimes the spice that makes the relationship meaningful.

I now have friends whose social, political and religious views are very different from mine. Sometimes these are differences we can discuss without rancor, sometimes not. When the differences are too painful for conversation, we simply opt to leave those topics out of our conversations. We seek and find common ground that allows us to continue to love and support one another, aside from those areas in which our disagreement would pull us apart. I have learned that it’s possible to disagree vehemently with friends, yet keep my disagreement to myself. I have come to understand that there is room in my life for many points of view and the fact that someone doesn’t see eye to eye with me is not a reason to avoid them, as long as we are mutually respectful of each other’s right to differ.

In fact, I find myself wishing that our public discourse could focus less on our differences and more on looking around us to find ways in which we can care for each other and for our country, rather than how to “best” one another. I am confident in my beliefs and feel no threat from those who don’t see the world the same way. I believe, in fact, that despite our differences, we can achieve important goals if we are willing to value one another more than we need to influence one another toward our own point of view.

Friends are a critically important part of my life. They are, many of them, an extended family that enriches my experience of the world in so many ways. They encourage me, they challenge me and I hope I do the same for them.

It has become a habit for my husband and me to walk early each morning on the shores of our beloved lake. One of the joys of those walks is watching the wildfowl that make their lives there and begin our days with their activities.

The geese are particularly interesting, honking and stirring as they move out of the coves where they have spent the night and into the grass or onto the lake. They honk and flutter, sometimes stirring suddenly off the water and taking flight noisily, for no apparent reason. Out of a group of domestic geese that once lived here, only one remains. It swims and waddles with the others, then is left alone when they fly away since it doesn’t fly. Wherever the flight has gone during the day, the geese are regrouped again the next morning with the single white one sailing close by its Canada goose companions.

In the spring they show off their babies, teaching them how to forage and how to swim. The geese have a lesson then for all of us. The entire gaggle watches over the young geese with the adults surrounding them on land and water, wary of us and any other potential danger that might come their way. The white goose is a part of this protective nursery, willing to challenge us if we seem too close with a hiss as fierce as any. Clearly, she is not the mother, but she cares for the young ones and is loyal to her “friends.”

In her way, she understands, as I do, the value of community, the grace of friends. I begin and end each day grateful, so thankful for the love and comfort of friends. Each day, too, I give thought to how I might be a better friend to those who are such good friends to me.

Thomas Jefferson, a man of great intellect, said it well: "I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."