In 2023, a few years after moving to Alabama for my husband's dream job at NASA, I found myself desperately lonely and facing the prospect of an adulthood over 400 miles from our hometown with a nonexistent social safety net. I felt like we were in a race against time: how quickly could we build the kind of community we would need as we began to build a family? I committed to spending the entire year pursuing any opportunity that might lead to a connection with others. I took pottery classes