Last year, my husband and I sold our house in DeKalb, Illinois, where he had finished the coursework for his PhD, and moved to Indianapolis. Neither of us was changing jobs. (We both work from home, so we can work anywhere.) But in the past few years, a growing list of our dear friends have ended up in Indianapolis. Now, there was more to our decision to move than just this, but the pull of friendship was real—to live in the midst of people who know us, who know our stories, who ask many of the same questions we do about life, faith, and mystery.
Friendship is a rare impetus for a move, I’ve realized. People tend to move for careers, to live near mountains or the ocean, for family—but not usually for friends. In fact, when we mention our friends as a reason for our move, people seem to not even register the word friends. Many folks whom we thought we’d already explained our move to—even family members—have asked a second or third time: Now, why did you choose Indianapolis again? I sometimes feel sheepish about it: Were my husband and I so desperately lonely, so little invested in our careers, and so callous about our families that we threw caution to the wind and got a new mortgage just so we could live near friends?
We’ve been here several months now, and already our quality of life has quietly and remarkably deepened—even in a pandemic—in a way I find hard to explain. We take walks or share meals—outdoors, socially distanced, and with masks—with people who want to talk about things we want to talk about, who make us laugh. We talk about people we know in common and the crazy ins and outs of our work, churches, and families. We remember things about each other from 10, 15, and 20 years ago.
