We moved to Farmington the summer I was five, which meant I knew exactly zero people, and at five that is a catastrophe on the scale of anything that’s happened to me since. No cousin down the block. No kid you half-recognize from the old neighborhood. Just a strange street, a house that still smelled like the family before us, and me, freshly friendless.
Those first days were all boxes and chaos. Rooms that weren’t ours yet, my parents buried in the thousand little jobs a move dumps on you, and me wandering around underneath it all like a very small, very bored ghost. If you’ve ever watched a five-year-old with nothing to do, you know the particular tragedy of it. A morning can feel like a life sentence.
One of those mornings I had my chin planted on the windowsill, surveying my bleak new kingdom, when my mom spotted him. A boy across the street. Red hair, the loud kind. He was out in his front yard scrambling all over the landscaping rocks by the driveway, clearly the star and sole citizen of some game only he understood. About my size. Turned out he was five too. Same age, same street, and neither of us had a clue the other existed.
Now, my mom did not sit me down for a talk about making friends. She did not walk me over and handle the introductions. She did something far more cunning. She baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies, loaded up a plate, and handed it to me with orders to march them across the street.
So off I went. Out the door and across a road that, to a five-year-old, might as well have been a six-lane freeway, holding that plate in front of me like a peace offering to a foreign nation. I didn’t know this kid. No plan, no opening line, nothing. Just me, a plate of warm cookies, and that red hair getting closer with every step.
We didn’t say much. You don’t need a lot of material at five. There were cookies, there were rocks, and honestly that’s a full afternoon. We spent the rest of that morning tearing around his yard, and a good chunk of the summer after it.
That’s how I made one of my first friends in Farmington. Not through bravery or charm, of which I had none. Through my mom, a plate of cookies, and a firm shove out the door.
I couldn’t tell you a single word we said that day. But I remember the red hair. I remember the rocks. And I remember that plate getting lighter and lighter, the two of us plowing through my mom’s cookies in his front yard, total strangers an hour before.
