More Community Building

 

Photo by Wren aka KDA

My WOTY (word of the year) for 2024 was "Community." However, I am still very focused on connecting with people in my new county.  In fact, I am obsessed with building bonds with a number of institutions and a number of people. 

It is challenging to move in your 60s. It's even more challenging to move to a rural area where many people my age are not open to forming new connections. Many women my age here already have their daughters, their daughters in law, and their best friends from elementary school. They do not have any time (nor the inclination) to connect with new people. I would probably be the same way if I had deep roots in my town. 

Nevertheless, I am spending a lot of time working to connect with people formally and informally. 

My formal commitments are these:

• I am an employee at Snow College, specifically an adjunct in the Department of English and Philosophy. Everyone in the photo above is employed by Snow College. People are pretty open there because many of them come from outside of the county. 
• I am an employee of the Ephraim Public library. I have seven co-workers. I am forming strong bonds with the people who work the evening shift with me because we spend more time together. 
• I am a member of a religious organization, which is called a "ward" here. It's more challenging for me to connect there. I do clean the church, run a book club, and mentor girls 7 to 11 in assignments (aka "callings") in the ward.  However, I am not as connected here as I have been in my previous congregations. There are a lot of hardworking, devout people. However, some of them are suspicious of me because I am divergent in many ways. (For example, my neighbor and fellow ward member thinks yoga is evil, and I regularly head to my car with a yoga mat.) 
• I am a member of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. Most of the women who belong to this organization have pioneer ancestors from this county. I have eighteen (18) pioneer ancestors on my direct lines; however, none are from here, so I am a bit of an outsider to the other members. 
• I serve at the Manti Temple as an ordinance worker every Friday; however, I also volunteer two or three times a month to work as a substitute. They always ask, "Where are you from?" But I'm not from here. Also, I am high energy and chatty. The ideal temple worker is more serene and silent. It's a struggle. Some people there embrace me for who I am. Some people scold me. It's a challenge, but I am determined to do my best to approach the ideal. Heaven help me!
• I volunteer at the Resource Clothing Bank a couple of times a month.  I help sort clothes that are donated and put them on hangers for display.

My informal commitments are theses:

• I exercise once a week with a group of women in Manti. 
• I exercise twice a week at the college swimming pool as part of the masters swimming class. I swim with women who were athletes in high school and college. They are kind to let me work to catch up to their level of skill. 
• I exercise once or twice a week with women in Mt. Pleasant at a yoga studio. 
• I attend a book club that my husband started and that I now run. We meet once a month.
• I attend a book club in Manti. We meet monthly, excluding the summer months. 
• I attend a discussion group in Provo attended by several retired members of the foreign service. I gave a presentation on elder tales, which blended by background in English and gerontology. 
• I was attending a book club in Provo where a number of high-powered women attend, but the two women I know the best do not allows attend, so I feel like a bit of an outsider, and it's probably best that I build ties here in my county instead of 90 miles north. 
• I drive 90 miles north about once a month to see my mother, step-father, and sisters. Sometimes I connect with college friends when I am up there. 

I do recognize that I cannot maintain this frenetic schedule forever. I often think of the Widow of Zerephath, the one with the oil and the flour who fed Elijah. At some point, I need to have faith that I will have the resources that I need if I am sick or sad or injured at some point while living in Sanpete County. In the meantime, I am trying to build connections with people so that if I become homebound people will know that I exist.  Truth be told, even if I had an assurance that I would never be vulnerable, it is my nature to be highly social and to build ties with people through a number of formal and informal commitments.  

I have done this in the past even when I knew that I was a short-term member of the community. However, this time, I feel times winged chariots on the back of my neck!