Not everything needs to be made from scratch...

Thus begins the month of gratefuls and I have an overflowing list. Just below the gratefuls of health, Matt, jobs, gospel comes great friends. After several years of being transplanted to new places with foreign faces, I grew accustomed to starting from scratch in making new friends. In the last while I have become "fit" for moving to new places, much in the same way one would get in shape to make a routine out of running up a sturdy hill and getting the adrenaline rush that comes with it when they reach the top. It isn't an utterly comfortable process but there is something thrilling and exciting about it. In this way, going to a new place and making new friends is a great adventure to be sure and not one to miss out on. But it takes a good push of effort and energy when trying out your sense of humor on a new personality and the like. And like exercise, it always takes so much more time than you want, expect or would hope.

All that said, I was prepped, ready, open-minded and determined to set out and find me some new friends when we moved out here to Colorado. I kept reminding myself that they come in unlikely places, often when you least expect and who you would not necessarily have thought would have been someone you would "get on" with so well. In Austin it was fellow swimmers in lanes next to me at the Amherst pool, in Edinburgh it was a spunky Polish housekeeper I worked with and an ex-Sailor Welshman (about 75 years old) who greeted me every time I made it through the rain to the Dalry Public Baths. So I anxiously looked around me in my first months here to see who I would make my new friend out of.

True to previous experience, it was in a most unexpected way that I found a great friend. What struck me as most surprising about it though was that it was a dear friend I already had! What luck! What surprise! For all you Anne of Green Gables fans out there, my "bosom" friend of yore, Claire, just lives an hour north of me in Fort Collins. And, like all best friends, though it had been an age since we had chance to reconnect, we picked up right where we left off. And though a visit can make for a bit of a pilgrimage, I have to say that it is an easy thing when meeting up and having a laugh is utterly effortless. And once again, I am amazed at the mysterious ways that good friends come about in new places - and there is something really lovely about when they don't always have to be built from scratch.

A perfect example of this, is when Claire gave me a tour of her Chemistry lab on campus and showed me around all her PhD projects, I immediately knew what there was to appreciate about the moment when in her torn and faded Princeton running clothes she reached in the fridge and pulled out a vial of orange crystals. With a shameless smile and great pride she shared with me: "Hey Cate! Check out these crystals I made this morning! Chemistry can be artistic you know." Such an utterly Claire-moment. And I had to agree - there was something artistic about the crystals and the event of her showing them to me as well.

So a tour of the CSU Chem lab, a wintery walk in Fort Collins and dinner with a bunch of nerdy Chemist friends of a great friend this last weekend is a perfect start to a grateful month.