As soon as Allison came through the door, her mother Rachel knew something was wrong. Rachel knew her daughter was shy around strangers, but unless someone else was in the house when Allison arrived home from school, she usually greeted her mother with a quick "Hi, Mom" before she headed upstairs to her room. This afternoon, however, Allison raced through the living room without a word and bounded up the stairs two steps at a time.
Rachel had never been shy, or so her parents always told her. According to them, Rachel was as likely to walk up to a stranger to ask what he or she was doing as Allison was loathe to be caught by a stranger's glance. Rachel hoped her daughter would grow out of her shyness, although she also had to admit to herself that her daughter may just be following in the footsteps of her introverted father, just as she had inherited his blond Scandinavian features. Matt would rather stay home tinkering with his electronic gadgets than go out for an evening with friends. But Rachel had known that about Matt ever since they met in sixth grade when Rachel's family moved to Seattle when the auto-parts plant her father had managed in Indiana shut down. Now they lived in Minneapolis where Matt was an engineer at one of the up-and-coming medical device companies. Rachel would have preferred to stay in Seattle for the sake of her husband and daughter because she knew they would each have more trouble making friends in a new city than she would.
In the two years they had lived in Minneapolis, Rachel had found several sources for friendship. They had joined a Lutheran church, a concession to Matt's upbringing, where Rachel volunteered to organize coffee and refreshments after each service. Before they joined, coffee and refreshments had been handled by the same three women for as long as anyone she asked could remember. One of the three made it known she was ready for someone else to take over. They had put out sign-up sheets to try to encourage others to help, but the list remained empty Sunday after Sunday. Rachel remembered a pastor saying that Lutherans invite someone to come with them to church once every 33 years, and her observations of the coffee service made her conclude that that is just about as often as each Lutheran was prepared to agree to volunteer, too. Unless someone asked them to, of course. And that is why Rachel's efforts were so successful. She loved meeting new people and having a request gave her an opportunity to call up perfect strangers to introduce herself and ask if they would be willing to help.
Rachel also volunteered on Saturdays at the library where books donated by the community were sold at a small shop each weekend. Allison loved to go with her mother to the library because she could sit in a corner with a new book while her mother worked. That once a week contact with the public gave Rachel her second source for friendships. Rachel saw clues in the books customers bought about their interests, and that always provided an opening for a conversation. She learned about a quilting group that met Wednesday mornings from a woman who bought Hidden in Plain Sight: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. And another woman who bought several books of one-act plays told Rachel about a reading circle that Rachel was considering joining. Rachel's life was as full of people as she wanted it to be, with opportunities around every corner should she feel in need of more.
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