Twenty-Eight: Another Good-Bye

            Today two of my friends are taking apart the last piece of the shop that I used to work at.  The original shop closed in June, but my one friend and the owner of the shop found an office space that worked for us.  She wisely took out a six month lease instead of a year; she just wanted to see how things would go.  Things went okay, but in the end it felt like many of the people we used to see every week had disappeared.  Last month, my friend decided that she was done.  She felt it was time to move onto something else.   It made me sad to think that there wouldn’t be even this thread of the shop left, but I think what I missed most was the friendship and camaraderie.  We spent four years learning and growing together our little group and there are times when my heart aches to think of it.  We have managed to stay in communication with the help of Facebook and a general willingness within all of us to keep the friendships alive.  We have weekly lunches that turned into dinners when I got a full time job, and we have made an effort to keep in touch with one another.  It would be easy to lose track of one another even though we all live close by, you can get caught up in life quite easy if you aren’t tending to the present moment carefully.  I feel so blessed to have so many good friends and as the door closes on this last part of the shop I knew and loved so dearly, I know that I am not saying goodbye to my friends.  Sometimes I wonder if my friend rented this space not as a space for the shop, but as a chance for us to strengthen all of our friendships even more, before finally letting the shop go for good.  It’s just a theory, but I think it’s an interesting one.  I look forward to our dinner tonight, where I will get to say Hello, rather than good-bye.