Nobody warns you how hard it is to make friends as an adult. You spend your twenties and thirties collecting people through sheer proximity, coworkers, other parents at pickup, the guy two cubicles over who becomes a groomsman, and then one day you look up and realize you haven’t had to try in fifteen years. Then you move somewhere new, or your kids stop needing you every afternoon, or both, and you discover that the skill atrophied the whole time you weren’t using it.
I’m forty-seven. I’m definitely not retired. My kids are mostly self-sufficient, I’m still fairly new to this area, and I like trying new things, and it turns out that’s plenty of reason to call this my own third chapter even without a gold watch involved. A little over a year ago I joined the Lakes Region Newcomers Club, mostly because I wanted to meet people and didn’t have a better plan than that. I was a little worried that because I had already lived here for a year, and been vacationing here for 15, I might not fit the criteria. Turns out, I needed have worried. There are members in the group who first joined twenty years ago…but its just that much fun.
The club itself is a large, well-organized thing. There’s a governance committee and bylaws, which sounds almost comically formal for an organization whose real function is helping people not eat lunch alone, but the structure is what lets each group underneath it run itself differently without the whole thing falling apart. Some groups are outdoorsy, some are social, some exist entirely around a shared, specific interest. What they have in common is that nobody’s checking whether you showed up last time, they’re just checking that you’re making a connection.
I just agreed to co-lead the Creative Writing group for the next year or so, which meets once a month, usually at a coffee shop or in a room at the Wolfeboro library. Someone in the group picks a theme, everyone writes a piece to it over the following weeks, and then we read our pages aloud and offer feedback using roses, thorns, and buds, what worked, what didn’t, and what has potential if it’s pushed further. Some of the members are published writers. Most of us are just imaginative neighbors who wanted somewhere to put the sentences. We’re adding poetry open mic nights at local restaurants this winter, which feels like the group stretching in new ways.
I’m also a fair regular at Lunch Bunch, which is exactly what it sounds like, a different restaurant somewhere in the region every month, everyone orders and pays for their own meal, and the whole appeal is that you never know who’s going to end up across the table from you. I’ve dipped into the knitting group too, which meets a couple of times a month at various members’ homes, welcomes total beginners next to genuine experts, and is where I learned that I’m what’s called a process knitter. I love the feel of it, the calm of knit and purl, and I have never finished a single project. Not one. The group didn’t seem to think that was strange, though they did offer to help me out if I ever decide I need to cast off instead of just casting on. Apparently a lot of knitting is just knitting. And a lot of people are really just welcoming.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you going in: some members join one group and that’s their whole social world, and that’s enough for them. I turned out to be a dabbler. I flit between groups, show up to some events more than others, and the connections vary in depth accordingly. But a few of the women from Creative Writing have become people I genuinely can’t imagine not knowing now. We started going to trivia together outside of the writing group entirely, and somewhere along the way we pulled in a friend one of us made through the mindful movement group, and another who came from the wine SIG. The newcomers club didn’t introduce us to each other directly so much as it kept putting us in rooms until we did the rest ourselves.
That’s really the point, and it took me a while to see it clearly. It isn’t about finishing the sweater or making every meeting or racking up some tally of groups joined. It’s about putting yourself in front of other people who have also chosen this place, on purpose, at whatever stage of life brought them here, and letting some of those encounters turn into something that outlasts the original reason you showed up.
If you’re weighing a move here and wondering whether you’d actually find your people, whatever chapter you’d be arriving in, this is some of what that can look like from the inside. Not automatic, not instant, but real, and it’s there if you’re willing to show up more than once.
And if you would like to come share a poem or grab lunch, let me know; I would love to introduce you to 250 of my nearest and dearest neighbors.
🧭 Jenn, Keys to the Lakes
This is part of an ongoing series about what the third chapter of life actually looks like in the Lakes Region, for the people who chose it.
