Forty Years On

An anniversary story.

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.

Our three-acre yard was libidinous with dandelions, sow thistle, foxtail, and quackgrass. I remember coming home from work; Deb was wearing a peach dress, eight months pregnant, our one-year-old in her lap, and was making rounds with that little riding mower. Trying to stay ahead of our knee-high “lawn.”

The well sanded up every week, and no matter how often I cleaned the trap, our showers and baths were always gritty. Fresh from one of those baths, Deb opened a dresser drawer and a mouse launched itself onto the waterbed.

Once a tornado grazed our yard, and winds swept the plastic pool off our deck and into the next county. Toys, patio paraphernalia never recovered.

Inside, the joinery was defective; outside, the sky threatened to sear or shatter us. That was the house where Deb prepared to leave me. It wasn’t the house, of course; it was our pain, loss; unique to each of us — death and divorce — but of the same species.

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 aurora borealis was on our side. Those wondrous lights, 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 taking time to watch them, feel their intensity, like some form of divinity, seep back in.

Slowly, we patched the house, groomed the yard, never could fix that well, but we got a better filter. Slowly, conversation came back to us, took on the colours of dawn, the shimmer of polar lights.

This was Deb, of course. Her determination, as she said, to “fight well,” keep the lines open, despite my proclivity, in moments of discord, to close down like a prodded sea anemone.

We went for counselling too, Deb’s initiative; but it was her intuition and the way our living room, and that patched couch beside the fireplace, where we burned the birchwood we cut and cured, became a place for questions instead of statements.

And here it is, 18 moves and 40 years later, and we’re still “fighting well,” still pulling weeds — clearing space and time for questions — and finding ever more flowers.

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 and attentive setting, like a well-loved garden, mystery flourishes with familiarity. And all it takes (all it takes!?) is listening, luck, forgiveness, understanding, a few safe friends, and the slow discovery of an all-weather love.

And all that taken together seems like something sacred.

Happy Anniversary, Deb!

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