Sitting at home on a snowy Sunday afternoon, it hit me for the second time in recent weeks how much I have to be grateful for. Gratitude is big these days -- I even went to a Gratitude Gathering earlier this year and had a very nice time. At that party, when asked to write on my name tag what I was grateful for, I couldn't come up with much beyond the obvious: I have no major financial worries, no serious marital strife, a very minimally dysfunctional family dynamic. I think what I ended up putting on the tag was "friends" or something about friendship. It seemed pretty obvious at the time, but upon further review, I think that truly is what I'm most grateful for. When all else fails, if you've still got friends, you can get through anything.

I've always had a tendency to be a long-term friend. If you become a close friend of mine, you'd better be in for the long haul. I maintain to this day two friendships that began in the seventh grade. One friend is out of state, but we always communicate on birthdays and Christmas at minimum, and she came here to visit just a couple of years ago.

The other friend is in-state but out of town. We communicate fairly regularly, but I hadn't actually seen her for a while until this past December. I'm not sure if I got across to her at the time how good it was to see her again, so I'll make good on that. I'd like her to know that even if we don't chat or see each other, she is someone I think of nearly every day. There's always something that brings up a memory we shared, or a song we liked, or a joke we had. Nearly every day -- that's pretty amazing, especially when our lives are very different from each other now.

My other close friends, who live here in the neighborhood, are getting close to their 10-year anniversaries. I met them serving on a neighborhood committee. One is twelve and the other fifteen years my senior, but we love sharing our generational differences and similarities.

And my husband has to count as a friend, because that's the way our relationship began. We're up to 20-plus years, counting friendship and marriage, and most people would probably describe the way we are with each other as more like friends than a typical married couple (and I mean that in a good way).

So yeah, friends. I truly value the friends I have -- both old and new -- and the friends I've had and lost one way or the other. Friendships shape us, help us grow, teach us things, and get us through the good and the bad. And for that I am grateful.