Our first house, like a bad suit, never fit the foundation.
Gaps beside the basement window casings were revolving doors for mice and a collection of bugs.
Bits of straw and chickweed hung from the concrete ledge where they made their pilgrimages.
The three-acre yard was libidinous with dandelions, sow thistle and quackgrass.
I remember coming home from work, you were wearing a peach dress, eight months pregnant, our one year old in your lap, making rounds with that little red mower, making headway, making hay.
The well sanded up every week (remember?) and no matter how often I cleaned the trap, our showers and baths were always gritty.
Fresh from one of those baths you opened a dresser drawer and a mouse launched itself onto the waterbed.
Once a tornado came close, and winds swept the plastic pool off our deck and into the next county.

Inside, the joinery was defective, outside, the sky threatened to sear or shatter us.
That was the house where you almost left me.
It wasn’t the house of course, it was our pain. Unique to each of us, but of the same sort.
Second marriages are more perilous. That’s just a statistic. And we could have made use of it.
But the moon was still young, and the Northern Lights were on our side.
Remember them? so bright, so full of movement as to wake us from sleep, saturate our bedroom.
And from our house, because of that treeless country yard, we saw both sunrise and sunset.
I don’t remember when, but together we started to take time to watch them, feel their intensity seep back in.
Slowly, we patched the house, groomed the yard; we never could fix that well, but we did get a better filter.
Slowly, conversation came back to us, took on the colours of dawn, the shimmer of polar lights.

This was you of course.
We went for counselling (your initiation as well), but it was your intuition and the way our living room (recall the long couch beside the fireplace where we burned the birch wood I cut and cured?) became a place for questions instead of statements.
Here it is, 32 years later and we’re still making space and time for questions. (Maybe our marriage is not so different from the little school you started. LOOC – Learning Out Of Curiosity.)

The lovely thing is, if we go on like this, as familiar as we are to each other, we’ll never plumb the bottom of us.
Not to get all Zen here, but in a charitable setting, mystery flourishes with familiarity.
And all it takes (all it takes?!) is listening, luck, forgiveness (the understanding of others), and as you’ve often said, learning each other’s love language.
And all that together seems like something sacred.

With all my love, Happy Anniversary Deb!