Keeping in Touch: Long Distance Friendships
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Keeping in touch is one of the hardest parts of friendship. Sometimes I find it bafflingly hard to keep in contact with friends of mine who live in my neighborhood, not to mention those long distance relationships (platonic of course) that need love and attention.
I’m a big fan of care packages. In fact, when two of my friends went away to law school I made regularly scheduled care packages a part of their semester. Timing them for times when I thought they’d need a little lovin’ from home the most. Moving days, mid-terms, finals, and birthdays: no time was safe from a surprise batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, or the entirety of the Target $1 section.
Sarah, over at the fantastical blog Pink of Perfection has touched on the art of care packages many times. I highly suggest snooping around her site. As for me, my suggestion is to keep them simple, keep them silly, and if they’ve got perishable items: overnight them. I learned this the hard way when my mother sent me a care package my freshman year of college only to be lost in the bottomless pit of a mail room and to be delivered months late. The pastries inside had spider webs as a ganache. Actually, they were probably preferable to the cafeteria food. But I digress…
Speaking of college, one of my favorite methods of keeping in touch with long distance friends was hatched when my two best friends and I went to three very different and very far schools. Nothing made us happier than passing notes in class, and since we considered ourselves an inseparable threesome anything we wrote had to be immediately accessible to the other two. This made college communication a bit tricky. Of course we bombarded one another with cards a la snail mail, but it all felt so two sided. Someone was always being left out.
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of THE BOOK, but THE BOOK came into fruition and has become a tradition in our friendship to this day. Of course we’ve gone through multiple THE BOOKs by now, but the tradition remains the same.
Our tradition requires one girly, sturdy composition book, a boat load of stickers, pictures, magazine clippings, sappy cards, and stories about our lives. A simple notebook that is the timeline of our friendship to be shipped back and forth to remind us all that we are always on one anothers minds.
I have to say THE BOOKs from times past are among my most treasured belongings. Inside are so many of our hopes and dreams, virginities (well not inside, but the stories of), first loves, engagements, embarrassing pictures, declarations of our love for one another-they are truly special mementoes of a long and history rich friendship. To this day I still get stupidly excited when the book comes in the mail. Now that college is over my two best friends live in our hometown, I still live away, but not quite as far away, we see each other regularly, but THE BOOK remains our very special way of keeping in touch.
Now that I’ve shown you mine, what are your very special ways to keep in touch with the long distance relationships that mean the most?
Rene says:
June 27th, 2009
8:39 am
What a great idea! I have friends in Australia and we really just rade emails and the occasional cards and care packages. But before email became our chosen communication method it was just letters. Good old fashioned, on stationary and covered in stickers and drawings letters. I LOVED getting a letter in the mail. It always made my day! To this day I have every letter and card from my Aussie friends. The Book, though. That is a great memento and something to be treasured.