It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.

We have donated $80 to the food bank so far in our own small town. The month is not over yet. During the shutdown, it seems like local organizations have seriously stepped up. One of the grocery stores in town is doing nightly hot meals for $3/adult and free for children. The other is doing dollar matching on all donations to the food bank, as well as donating tons of food. It has been encouraging to see the community step up as need presents itself, and I wish we could be this way all the time.

We also have a selection of winter coats and boots to donate to the winter clothing drive. The homeless men have left and I haven't seen them since the very beginning of the month, but I have to ask around and see if anyone knows where they are now and if they need anything.

I have hosted people at my house for meals 3 times so far this month and met one friend for coffee. I meet another on Tuesday. Making the effort to reach out and then schedule times with friends has been challenging, but the actual time spent with them is good for my soul. I highly recommend it if you have the spoons.

Making friends as an adult is really difficult, and reaching out to strangers is difficult. One of the things I discussed with some ex-Navy friends and later my mom was how the constant uprooting and resettling of the military life created an environment where friendships were easy to build and isolation was almost impossible. You lived in a restless world, surrounded by people arriving, people leaving, roles that suddenly needed filling, and roles that would need filling in a year or two. The constant turnover meant there was always space for you, and if you stepped in to fill a need you didn't exactly love fulfilling, that was okay because it was only for a year or two at most.

In the more settled world of civilian life, these things are so different as to be almost unnavigable. People complain of struggling to make frineds, everything shouts about the loneliness epidemic among adults, and the solution is so difficult and so easy. It's dangerous to volunteer for a position you're not crazy about in civilian life because that might be your new identity. You arrive in a new church, a new school, a new community, and there's no room for you. The roles are filled, or everyone has given up on that because nobody wants "nursery worker" to be their identity for the rest of their existence, or "bake sale manager" or any other exhausting job that is difficult to fill.

Faced with this weird challenge that has bothered me since leaving college, I've done "military kid" things that I only just realized are from my life as a military kid. I text people I've met once and ask them to dinner. I have, twice in my life, asked specific women I barely knew if they would mentor me, because I was at sea and they were older and wiser. And these things have yet to steer me wrong, though they have been met with some surprise. (Also I'm still hesitant to take on roles that don't suit me because I'm terrified of being stuck in it.)

Sometimes making these advances is uncomfortable. A die-hard introvert, I love to be at home and left alone, but it's not a very fulfilling existence. The best thing about this system is that I'm frequently the host which means I still get to stay home (though I have to panic clean my house), but I also get to build relationships. The friendships I've been building aren't glamorous; we don't have girls nights hardly ever, there's no bar crawls or escape rooms or whatever the activity du jour is. Mostly there's lots of tea and coffee and pastries and dinners and bonfires and sometimes board games, but mostly just coversation and that feeling that we aren't alone after all and the world is actually an okay place.