Handsome Chef Boyfriend and I spent yesterday Christmas shopping over in Saratoga Springs. We had fun, observed people, marveled at humanity, privately assessed it as we are wont to do for amusement. We ate lunch and dinner out, rare for us, and arrived home content if a little weary, with a bargain Christmas tree tied to the top of the Subi.

On the ride over to New York I lamented the absence of friends, a void I’ve felt since I moved to Vermont. Once you leave a tightly knit community it is difficult or maybe impossible to rebuild the kinds of relationships that happen when you raise a family there. HCB and I compared notes about the kinship we once felt between our own families and others during our respective marriages.

For my part, I will say those relationships grew out of two important institutions in my life at the time: neighborhood and church. There was much overlap between them, and two families in particular emerged as important cornerstones in the life of my young family.

There is nothing like that here in my new life in Vermont. I have not felt connected to any church community since my arrival here save one, and that was in my first year when I lived near the New Hampshire state line in Vermont’s Upper Valley. Community and neighborhood have a very different connotation in general in a rural state where neighborhoods in the traditional sense are rare, unless you live in one of the few towns with any critical mass to it.

But anyway the reality is HCB and I work hard in our professional lives and spend much of our time outside work mainly dotting i’s and crossing t’s. We are still in survival mode, the two of us, and will likely be a while longer before we can really figure out how the horizon looks, much less try to establish friendships with others of our ilk.

This morning I grinned when I slid into the driver’s seat before my yoga class and found it adjusted for a very tall chef. After class I headed to a little café like so many others you’re likely to find on Main Streets in New England villages; I was there to meet up with a recent acquaintance, another writer with a keen desire to see her own work published, but who also spends her professional life writing as do I. We were united initially by an online lament that it is just plain difficult to do justice to your own writing at the end of a long day spent writing for someone else. I have come to realize it is a good problem to have, and am not really complaining.

When I arrived at the café a jazz trio had just set up and were about to start their Sunday afternoon set. It was quirky and odd to find a straight-ahead jazz trio in this kind of venue on an early Sunday afternoon to be sure, but Vermont itself is pretty quirky and odd. In spite of that the musicians were tight and the original compositions they played were good; the band’s spokesman explained each piece to his attentive audience using humorous language suffused with just the right amount of technical jargon. Jazz can be discordant, and much of this jazz in particular was written in seven—don’t try to dance to this, he jokingly chided. I still found it interesting and listenable.

It is good to be pushed outside one’s comfort zone from time to time; I have been all kinds of pushed outside my comfort zone in the last three years. The comfort of cherished friendships is elusive; forging relationships is more challenging now and requires different skills in this still-new landscape. To borrow the music metaphor, there may be only discordant, complicated harmonies written in confusing time signatures. As Jack Nicholson’s character Melvin Udall (ironically a writer) famously asked a roomful of anxious people in a psychiatric waiting room, What if this is as good as it gets? 

Maybe this new, discordant landscape of hard-to-forge relationships is as good as it gets. Who can say?

But maybe an uncertain landscape brings with it something edgier and distinctly more interesting than a wistful yearning for a chapter long closed. Maybe there will be dancing to music written in seven.