Believe it or not, it’s time for our final Five Minute Friday link-up of August 2024!
If you’re new to the FMF community, you can learn more about the link-up and how it works here.
This week’s FMF writing prompt is: HISTORY
Setting my timer for five minutes, and . . . GO.Â
This past week I reconnected via voice notes with some friends I had lost touch with for a while . . . friends we had known and loved for ten years when we lived in South Africa. Friends we did life with, prayed with, cried with, laughed with. Eventually we moved to the States and they stayed behind and years have passed and life has moved on.
But when I heard their voices on my phone this past week, I realized how much I value friendships with history. Friends who know me from long ago.
About four years ago we left the house we had lived in for eight years and moved to a different suburb. We left our church of eight years and pulled our kids out of their school. After losing these three significant anchor points, I suddenly felt a bit adrift. In this new place, who would I call if I got a flat tire?
My husband teases me when I get to see some of my mom’s old friends. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, my husband says I just talk and talk and talk and don’t stop. I don’t know, I think it’s something about the shared history, about knowing that they knew her before she died. They are like a piece of string that attaches me to her in a way that others cannot, others I met after she died.
Of course new friends are a blessing as well, but for me, a great satisfaction comes from interactions with those with whom I share a meaningful history, and I thank God for that.
STOP.
+++
REMINDER
Our next Writing Accountability Group is starting soon!
We’ll be meeting eight times on Zoom during the month of September to write together in real time.
No experience necessary, and you won’t be put on the spot to share your work. We just show up and write!
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND SIGN UP
+++
Join us with your own five-minute freewrite on the prompt, HISTORY, below, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment:Â
I have never been nostalgic,
the past means not a thing to me.
Some might find this thinking tragic,
but it’s good to have no history,
’cause each day is a fresh new thing,
no baggage from fictional past,
and to the party I can bring
the quality that’s made to last,
and that is living in the now,
letting go the passing hours
to flare and dim in fire’s glow,
turned to ash that never sours,
and no weal, nor present pain
will prevent me to begin again.
Four minutes. Or so.
When you get with people, cousins, and friends you/’ve grown up with, it is like stepping back in time–the history and relationships pick up as those you were never gone– and new history is made through reconnections.
Yes, you make a good observation. Friends with shared history are the best. Sometimes I find it painful hanging out with my husbands friends with whom I have no history, so I have nothing to say. They laugh and I’m lost. But I also know my husband has to deal with the same lost feelings when I’m with my old friends. But the more we visit with our History Friends, the more comfortable I become.