The "Wreath" of Family and Friends

Yet another quote from Linda Greenlaw's great book, The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island, in which she talks about returning to her birthplace, the Isle of Haut seven miles off the coast of Maine, with a year-round population of just under 50!

A good half of these she’s actually related to, in one way or another. I particularly like her description which will serve as today’s “quote o’ the day”:

“Family trees in small-town Maine are often painted in the abstract. The Greenlaws’ geneology is best described in a phrase I have often heard others use: ‘the family wreath.’”

But I’m not certain that the power of the “family wreath” rests strictly on blood or marriage ties...

In my complimentary Dec. 20th copy of USA Today that I picked up while traveling, the headline reads, "Budding friendships fill out the family tree."

"For a growing number of Americans," it says, "the idea of family extends beyond the old definition of blood ties. In many ways, friends are the new family." (Especially because “more than 25% of households today are composed of singles – the fastest-growing household type.”)

In fact, the article continues, "new research conducted in the United Kingdom supports what many U.S. experts on friendship say: It’s not an either/or situation. Families are not endangered by friendships. Family and friends compliment rather than compete.

‘Friends can be family, and family can be friends,’ says British sociologist Ray Pahl of the Institutes of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex [who examined questions about 10,000 respondents’ relationships with their three best friends]. ‘What we’ve shown is this process of suffusion – family becomes more friend-like, and friends become more family-like,’ says Pahl, co-author of a book called Rethinking Friendship, due next summer.”

I guess sociologists call it "fictive kinship." But I for one prefer to call it my "non-traditional, extended family"!

What's more, “as new family-like groups are being created from cadres of friends, the benefits are clear both physically and emotionally. Research has long shown that people with well-developed friendship networks live longer than people who don’t. Several studies have shown that people who have at least one close friend have greater resistance to disease and speedier recoveries and lower incidences of mental illness.” Apparently, “for the elderly, friends are a better predictor of survival than family"!

Anyway, all this is just my typically verbose way of being grateful to my own "fictive kin" for the "greater resistance," "speedier recoveries," and "lower incidences of mental illness" they lend me!

Many thanks, "bros"!! :-)