I have thought a lot about the cyclical nature of friendships. I cannot name the number of people who seem to rotate in and out of my life. Friendships are amazing things, they add color and shading to our lives, creating something more vivid than before.

Enough of analogy, why am I thinking about friendships? Well two things. One is the departure of some very dear friends of ours. They are moving to Florida. (Future posts idea -- couple friends -- spent some time inserting it into this post but that is not what this post is about.) They have been our "goto" friends for the past year or so, the friends you call at the spur of the moment to do margaritas, movies, or just hanging out. The great thing about goto friends is that the best times are often had without plans. Over the past year the best of times have been had with our goto friends, they are already missed, and the blank spots in our nights will be hard to fill. We took some pictures of them before they left - one was the picture included in this post. It's hard to watch friends move away, but even harder to watch them drift away.

This weekend we attended a wedding for one of my wife's friends. It was not the happy event that it should have been. A couple of months ago her friend found herself on the wrong side of marriage and pregnant. This weekend she had a small backyard ceremony, and after a few giggled oaths her boyfriend became her husband. It's hard to summarize feelings on such an occasion. There are lots of tight smiles and disingenuous congratulations. Statistics tell us that chances of happy endings in such situations are not good. What type of ending is "good" in such a situation?

On the long drive home my wife sat silently for a long time and stared into the passing East Texas landscape. The sun was casting the last touches of the days light along the fields and small towns we passed. My wife's friend has slowly drifted away over the past couple of years. They were friends whose relationship was based on the past, and that distance is far greater than the one between us and our friends in Florida.

There are tiny margins that separate different possibilities in our lives. How many moments separate any of us from a life far different from the one we picture ourself in. A backyard wedding seems an appropriate example for the choices that mark the biggest of changes in our lives.