Fridge-poking friends

JW and I have been living here for a while now. We have friends, who we invite over for dinner and meet for brunch. (Now that I think about it, we rarely seem to do any other friend activities, maybe because we don't want to subject them to kid stuff and we can't do any adult stuff. But that may change in the summertime when we can be outdoors.)

But we don't really have close friends in town. My measure of a really close friend is when you can invite yourself over and then poke through their fridge without asking. That might be too much to ask. I think it takes a while to get there. I would be happy with the kind of friend that you can call up and say, "Hey, want to do something?" instead of having some specific plan a week in advance, and then being able to call them again within a couple of days without feeling like you're bothering them. And maybe the kind of friend who you call up and say, "You'll never believe what happened!" Somebody who you don't have to make an effort to stay in touch with.

I have friends like that. They're my friends from high school and college. They're all in New York and California.

I don't know if we'll ever get that here. I guess we'd have to meet another family with kids of a similar age, or at least that liked hanging out with our kid. And they'd probably have to live fairly close by. And then we'd all have to be willing to put the time in. Seems like a tall order. Everybody seems so busy.

I know a couple of people who have siblings and other family nearby. I wish my brother and I could live in the same town, but we haven't since I was 11 years old and I doubt we ever will.