Attachments

Four decades ago, as a young woman trying marriage and motherhood on for size, I lived among a cadre of North Americans placed willingly or not in a country not our own. Uprooted from across the United States, we were sent to supervise and protect the citizens who lived in what was then West Germany.

Naïve, brash, we fused into community, strangers who quickly grew familiar. We shared the travails of living in a country foreign to us, the richness of another culture, the hilarity of misunderstanding. We gossiped about the locals, traded shopping tips, and directed each other to great dining on a soldier’s salary.

With youthful exuberance we gathered together for traditional holidays and to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and promotions. We formed attachments.

Fast friendships held for two, three, sometimes four years. Reassignment meant bittersweet goodbye with promise to write, call, and of course visit whenever paths might cross again. But the annual holiday greeting cards, the occasional birthday phone calls dwindled through the decades. We moved on.

Lately I have begun to reflect on that tight-knit community in which we lived forty-odd years ago.

In March 2005 my husband and I discovered San Pancho and within days purchased a winter home. We decided to live outside North America part of the year because we wanted sunshine, adventure, challenge, a touch of adversity to prove a bit of mettle still remains.

During the years we have met like-minded souls with whom we share the fun and trouble of living in a foreign place. We gossip about the locals, trade bargaining tips, and direct each other to great dining on social security salary. Attachments are cemented through weekly card games on the beach, shared dinners in the pueblo, organized hikes, and a myriad of volunteer opportunities.

But those attachments are not as furious as the ones formed 40-odd years ago. A sigh beyond the middle years, many of us have begun to assess stamina, security, and stability for the years ahead; some of us have begun to contemplate life more comfortable than life carved here.

Some of us are selling our homes in San Pancho, ready to move on. As before, there are promises to keep in touch, crisscross the country every couple of years to visit, call to commiserate the state of the States, comfort one another in time of need. But the attachments we have formed seem substantive this time around. Perhaps because there is less time to subjugate the priority of friendship. With age comes simplicity.

Attachments frayed with age, perhaps, but not with time.