Where do we go from here?

We went over to some friend's house for dinner last night. As we were leaving the wife casually uprooted one of the plants lining her walkway and gave it to me.

It's called a blackberry lily. Judging from the look of the their yard, it can be fairly invasive. At least, it has been with them. Hopefully it's also sturdy enough to handle being torn out of the ground as a preliminary to being replanted. Not that I think I'll have a hard time getting another from her if this one dies. It's a good thing I'm entirely doing container gardening, though!

This woman is something of a supergardener, the kind of person who has an asparagus patch, a grape arbor, blueberries, a quarter acre vegetable garden, strawberry plants that she has to keep beating back, cherry trees, plum trees, raspberries, you name it, she grows it and grows it well.

Needless to say, she's also into canning and preserving all the food she grows. Since also I'm into gardening (she has the kind of garden I dream about having someday,) canning and preserving you'd think it would be a cinch to make friends with her. Especially since I can tell she wants to be friends with me and both of us are making a real effort toward that.

And yet, we just can't make it happen. We just can't get anywhere beyond rather stilted conversations about those two main areas. It's pretty frustrating, since I still don't have all that many friends here. I'd love to get some more. I don't know why we can't connect. I've never experience anything like it before and I'm not sure what to do.

How is it that two people who want to be friends can't make it happen? It just doesn't make sense to me.