It was the middle of August — the dog days in South Dakota. I was hot, tired and car-less.

I was irritable at the thought of working one more day in the Hy-Vee floral department, but at the same time I didn’t want to deal with having to go to class in just a few short weeks.

I was feeling cranky and looking for ways to make me feel worse so I could wallow in my moodiness.

See, it had just hit me that it was time to say good-bye, again. I would once again have to leave my friends and my summer and have to come back to Ames.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to come back to Iowa State. I couldn’t wait to see my friends here.

Staying up until 3 a.m. talking to my roommate, walking across campus with my boyfriend, dancing to bad ’80’s music in a friend’s room — these were all things I missed tons during the summer.

But saying good-bye is one of the hardest things for me to do, especially to people and places that I may not see again for a long time.

So there I was, moody and tired, sitting on the couch and watching reruns of “My So-Called Life” on MTV, when the angst-ridden but insightful Angela Chase said these words: “You can be connected to people in so many different ways.” This struck me as being appropriate as I floated back to the “other world” of my life once again.

There are people to whom we always feel tied from our hometown, in varying degrees.

Many of them aren’t even strong connections. You know — the people you can count on; the people who are always there.

I’ll miss people from my church, who always asked about my family. I’ll miss my co-workers, who always made me laugh. I’ll even kind of miss customers at Hy-Vee.

They were all familiar, comforting in a way. Former teachers and classmates, old pals of my parents — friends, acquaintances, even people I couldn’t stand all have small links to me in some way or another.

But those I’m most closely connected to are my friends from high school. The girls with whom I laughed, cried and went to Perkins and bad movies — they are the ones who know me better than I know myself, and they are the ones I will really miss.

I said good-bye to them last year, too, and you would think that leaving them for college the first time would’ve been more traumatic.

But, last year I knew with certainty that I was coming back to Sioux Falls. This year, it’s a more permanent farewell. I won’t be going back, and neither will most of them. Leaving them for good is incredibly hard for me.

Then, on the other hand, there are my new connections.

My college friends are the ones I spend my time with now. They know me, too, but there’s still a lack of history with them. Everytime I think of some stupid former inside joke with some of my other friends, I realize that.

I know my friends here in Ames are just as important, if not more so, than the people I spent years building relationships with back home, and I know I’m connected to them just as much as with people from South Dakota, but now it’s in a completely different way.

I will most likely always feel connected to South Dakota and the part of me that’s still there.

That’s probably why every time I see someone wearing a University of South Dakota sweatshirt I still run them down and tell them I’m from South Dakota, too. That’s also why every time I go into Hy-Vee, I inform the clerk that I worked at Hy-Vee, too, and then force her to swap stories with me. I suppose these are the little ways I try to stay connected to my past.

I miss my friends. They are an important part of my life. I will always feel connected to them. Connections as deep as ours can’t just be undone. Our relationships will change and evolve, but they won’t disappear. They’ll just be different.

Angela Chase was right.

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Sara Ziegler is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.