The View of Forever from Here

Exactly twenty-nine years ago this morning, I woke up married.

Twenty-seven years ago, it was beyond my imagining and nowhere on my to-do list.

I’d been happily single for the better part of the mid-80’s, rounding the corner into the 90’s with an almost evangelical approach to the Unfettered Life. I enjoyed (yes, you read that right) paying my bills on time or earlier, taught myself some next-level culinary skills and set bread dough to rise every Friday morning while I cleaned my two-bedroom Tudor-style townhouse rental from top to bottom. My job at the university’s progressive-minded town-and-gown Newman Center Catholic church as a member of the pastoral staff guaranteed rich and diverse discussions about All Things Theological and Philosophical, accompanied by endless pots of coffee in the lounge after Mass. A nearby bike trail along the river within walking distance of my apartment pulled me into a 22-mile daily trek through woods and the edges of old neighborhoods from the early 20’s. Squirrels occasionally pelted me with buckeyes as I rode beneath their lofty leafy nests and I’d playfully shake one fist at them as I pedaled along, all of us fully aware that this ride-by admonishment would have zero effect on their behavior. I dated and had my heart broken a few times, but most days I was more or less comfortable in my own skin, allowing for the customary push and pull of inner growth that marks the young adult developmental stage of one’s life.

Enter Patrick.

A mutual friend (and coworker of mine at the church) suggested we’d have a lot in common, that we should meet on the premise of adding the Newman Center to a list of faith communities willing to house homeless families on a rotating basis (Patrick headed up this program for his own parish) and laid the groundwork for what is now the central and anchoring relationship in my life. We met on August 11, 1992, at 8:38 p.m. following a prayer service I was leading on the need for social justice to be intentional reflection as well as action (the name of the gathering escapes me but I assure you, it was much shorter than what I just wrote). He introduced himself and the friend who was with him and we made plans to meet for a more thorough conversation about the logistics attached to feeding and sheltering families within the church building’s walls. I had no reason to think it was anything more than business.

But as with any trip you plan and the way it actually unfolds, the chasm between expectations and reality is filled with that alchemic blend of emerging information, data analysis and spontaneous combustion all wrapped up in love’s penchant for chaos theory. Sheltering homeless families evolved into our sheltering of each other, taking great care to respect our respective stories and pasts while we eyed a future with each other. Plus, he wore a bow tie and pink Oxford shirt to work on Fridays, paying homage to a long tradition held up by the men in his family tree. Standing there in the Newman Center’s kitchen that indelible Friday in September, pink shirtsleeves rolled up as he unpacked the tuna salad and mixed greens he’d brought for both of us to eat while we talked, his agenda was looking less like “business” and more “let’s see where this goes”. I felt that internal swaying one often has when going all dreamy in the presence of great joyful possibility and steadied myself by placing my hands on the stainless-steel countertop, casually so he wouldn’t suspect I’d fallen off the edge of all logic and propriety. I think I got away with it but what does that matter now? We talked overnight volunteer support, safety and menus, cots and drop-off/pick-up times for the church’s future guests and set up a tentative launch date (for the program, not our wedding). We’d have to see each other quite a lot in the weeks ahead, which neither of us minded at all.

We’ve seen each other for 1,508 weeks since then and stand at the start of the 1,509th one with a beehive-busy to-do list of humble work that will slide us nicely into Thanksgiving. There’s recycling to drop off, a coop that needs cleaned out and re-fluffed with fresh pine shavings, granola to be bagged and stored for an upcoming three-day holiday market and a chicken in the fridge waiting to be spatchcocked and grilled for dinner. I’m in charge of dessert—a gluten-free dark chocolate salted almond olive oil cake best eaten just after it’s cooled a bit on the counter, accompanied by a steaming cup of honeyed rooibus tea to sip in between bites. Paying bills has long since lost that mid-20’s thrill of independence (anyone want to subsidize these two hippies’ rural artist colony lifestyle? PM me for details) and I’m quite content letting Patrick take lead on all things culinary, no matter how he employs every last bit of silverware and all the cooking utensils in the process. I’ll clean up any kitchen mess he makes with my head bowed in gratitude.

Of course I’ve skipped over mountains of details and stories that built the framework and foundation of who we’ve become as Liz & Patrick. I’m not sure I’d know where to stop and a simple weekly column on my website isn’t the place for such an epic love story as ours. But as the sun shines from a backdrop of pure cloudless blue on the place we call home, I can’t remember what I thought being single would look like when I reached the age I am now. Guess I didn’t plan that far ahead, and I’ll certainly need to sit for more than an hour to figure out just how we got here.

Come sit with me, Patrick and let’s tell the stories of our days and weeks and years together while we keep gathering more.

Happy anniversary, honey.

Oh, the Possibilities

It’s 5:20am, 32 degrees outside and the top step of the front deck is coated in a thin crust of snow. With the heating pad’s setting on “2” and the closest soft throw tucked snugly ‘round my lap and legs, I’m ensconced in my place on the recliner couch as I look into the last inky blackness of the night framed by the living room windows. Xena is all smoothed and settled into her mousy dreams to my right and Tink, the newest addition to our clowder, makes a vertical leap from the footrest, ricochets off the blanket chest-turned-coffee table into the antique platform rocker near the entrance to the kitchen, connecting hard with the carved curved arm of the chair before sticking the landing. A six-week-old kitten has turned our home into her own private pinball machine. One more toppled lamp and its broken compact florescent light bulb scattered at our bare feet, and it’ll be Game Over.

When it’s just light enough to the east, I’ll layer up and walk the paths like I do, finish up the last of the fall planting (garlic, the rest of the heirloom tulip bulbs from my uncle and three Russian sage plants still showing some promise, even this late in the season) and tuck in again, this time sitting at the work table in my studio, stitching glass beads and chips of lapis lazuli semi-precious stone to a piece of soft wall art I started at the beginning of lockdown. Time will slow down or stop completely, and I’ll be lost in that sweet spot of untethered Imagination, letting my mind wander through the landscape of possibility. It begins with “What if…?”

What if…one day, on the morning walk, I just sat on the left side of the curb-gleaned dark pine green antique wicker loveseat that I hauled home in June, nestled just off the walking path into a thicket of blackberry stalks across from that bend in the creek, and stayed there for most of the day?

What if…I didn’t talk myself out of asking someone for help?

What if…that last hedgeapple hanging from the very top of the osage orange tree on the ridge didn’t fall, even in the strongest gale-force winds, all winter?

What if…the Black Strawberry tomato seeds I saved on a piece of paper towel in August actually sprouted and grew stems and leaves and bore fruit next July?

What if…the Downton Abbey series had never ended?

What if…I actually slept straight through the night?

What if…the gentleman who stopped by our booth at the market two weeks before the midterm elections and monologued for thirty minutes about his own stance had asked me how I felt about things…and then listened?

What if…Patrick had followed through on his bottle rocket desire to become a chimney sweep in the late 90’s?

What if…I knew how to operate a chainsaw?

What if…that laughing crow who is always hanging out in the meadow lands on my shoulder this morning with her satiny ebony wings and accompanies me on the rest of the walk, down to the coop to let the chickens out, back up the slope to the ridge to fill the suet feeders and out to the potting shed to gather up the garden tools I’ll need this afternoon?

What if…the leftovers from last night’s dinner of huckleberry barbecue-sauced chicken breasts just kept replenishing themselves in the darkness of the fridge while we slept?

What if…we could join our favorite film or television show as one of the characters but retain our own identity and selves throughout?

What if…our haircuts never grew out?

What if…we could tell our stories honestly and be given acknowledgement that they’re still being written?

What if…Tink just stayed little?

What if…snow fell thick and fast, as large flakes that filled our cupped hands and didn’t melt on contact?

What if…we really did put things back where we found them, closed what we opened, washed what we dirtied, finished what we started?

What if…mystery was simply allowed to be mystery, far from the prying and prodding fingers of “I must figure this out”?

What if…I let people into my life as it is, didn’t feel the need to tidy it all up first?

What if…I didn’t argue with myself about what “wasted time” really is?

What if…there were no clocks at all?

What if…uncertainty and imperfections were valued more than their opposites?

What if…Sting finally wrote back?

I’m going to need more beads, I think…

Seeking Shelter

A pale autumn sun sipped at the night’s last stars and while my back was turned, swallowed the moon’s sideways smile in one soundless gulp as I made my way back to the woods. On the other side of a marathon market weekend (three events in two days—a lot for us), I welcome the softer start to my morning and the chance to get reacquainted with something other than parchment-lined baking pans and the aroma of cinnamon. No matter how bone-tired I am, or how challenging the elements, I never regret the decision to walk the land.

It’s a color carnival out there this year and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Each tree is vivid and unstoppable. Everyone’s talking about it at work, posting views from their front windows and driveway aprons on every social media site within hand’s reach, displaying an ombre of oranges and reds, deep rich mustards and translucent saffrons from the silver maple out back, edged in a crimson bleed. Somebody get Crayola on the phone—they might wanna update their deluxe box of sixty-fours, or at least dedicate a collection to the season.

I like how nature seems to have arranged for the trees to shed their leaves on some sort of rotation schedule—the sycamores first, all crispy brown caramel and milk chocolate, then silver and red maples taking their time dropping a leaf here, five there. The black walnuts shimmer their golden dresses down to the ground the minute a good breeze comes through, and I watch the kittens jump to catch them in the driveway, unable to resist all that twisting movement and sideways fluttering. And the sweet gums with their calicoed tunics, one tree sporting a deep beet-red collar at the top of its canopy while the rest of its leaves move from orange to yellow to pale celery. If rainbows were trees…(much gratitude to friends Deb and Mike for sharing about 50 young saplings from their place one day after Thanksgiving, getting them all tucked into our waiting landscape. The butternut squash soup and homemade bread we shared wasn’t nearly enough of a thank you).

What a shock it would be for the leaves to all drop at once without warning, no gradual easing into the cold exposed months of winter. This slow and measured transition feels kind and motherly and we receive it as gift for spirits already raw from the abruptness of life’s other harsh about-face moments. But I still stand beneath them all and wonder where summer went. Just six weeks ago, they gave us respite from a stronger and more determined sun as we plucked errant bindweed and thistles from the garden’s raised beds. Now their bare arms and fingers reach for a cooler sky about to go brittle in the span of another six weeks. Good thing I’m romantic about the views that surround me. I’ll try to remember that when I’m schlooping my way through the slush and ice on my way to the coop to see if the girls even want to leave their cozy pine shavings-fluffed bed and peck at the grain scattered in the morning’s snow.

Friends, life has been even heavier lately. In a staffing restructuring at work, I lost my admin and am working with my other teammate to take on the duties left behind, most of which we haven’t touched for four years. She took another position in the company, so we’ll still get to see her, thank goodness, but the gap in our team is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I haven’t been able to shake yet. I’ve taken to fretting again about how Patrick and I will age (it’s an episodic theme that surfaces this time of year as our bodies slow down and we walk reluctantly into the shrinking light of the next two months). The headlines continue to test the elasticity of one’s heart with the brutality of Russia’s war against Ukraine, cholera plaguing the good souls of flood-ravaged Nigeria and just last night, a crowd surge at a Halloween event in Seoul that left over 150 young adults trampled to their deaths. I know I should stop scrolling, and I do, but there are still too many unnecessary empty chairs at tables these days whether I’m reading about them or not.

So I suit up and head outside, walking sticks in hand and beg the trees for just another day of their comforting shelter, understanding that we’ll need to face the bare days of winter together, looking for grace and beauty wherever we can find it. When I wonder if I’m up to the task, Patrick greets me at the end of a workday with a pot of vegetable soup simmering and steaming up the kitchen windows. He smiles and pulls me in for a “how was your day” embrace and I reshape my definitions of shelter and protection, instantly and deeply aware of what I have, resolved not to take it for granted. It’s within my grasp and influence, this posture of humility and also my moral duty. I’ll keep asking “what else can I do?” and quiet my worried heart to hear the answer. Meanwhile, there’s a mulberry in the meadow, still shaking her green branches at us and I wonder what she knows that her ash and cottonwood neighbors don’t. She guards the creek as squirrels run up and down her trunk and across the grass at her feet, saying “not yet, not yet. When I’m ready.” Teachers are everywhere here.

So I’ll keep taking my tires bones out to the woods. I’ll remember the colors across the fields, throwing all my trust into a spring that so far keeps coming back to dress our trees in reassuring garments of hope and growth.

That’s what “what else?” looks like from here.

Alphas, Omegas, and the Stuff in Between

A few weeks ago on a Friday, I met a young man who irons his paper money without explanation or apology. The next morning, I watched a cobweb spinner slowly descend from the kitchen cabinet on a single silken strand and come to rest near a splash of water on the counter, fold its long legs inward like the metal frame of a market canopy and take a drink.

Two unrelated firsts at my age (having just rounded the corner on a milestone birthday easily divisible by ten) giving further evidence that simply waking up is a worthy endeavor and, as my hospice work has taught me, a privilege denied to many. With wonders like these waiting for me in the dawn’s early light, I don’t even use an alarm clock anymore.

I also don’t intentionally pursue such moments; they just cut across my path and I notice them deeply for as long as it takes to gather the data and process it through filters that include humor, curiosity and precious little judgment. I’ll be the first to tell anyone that I’m late to most parties (ask me when I started using Facebook or tapping my feet to One Direction’s music…well past their launch dates, I assure you) and tend toward wonder that masquerades too often as ignorance, but I know the difference and will argue for it when given the chance. A long-winded description of simply being open, but there it is.

So fast forward to last Sunday, when a dear friend from my early adolescence paid us a visit all the way from South Carolina—my first boyfriend at the tender age of thirteen, and we’ve stayed in touch all these decades—and here he is, sitting in an antique chair across from Patrick, my current and last boyfriend, sharing stories about being restaurant managers. It was a relaxed and easy exchange, as if they’d grown up together on the same street and played kickball after school. Without effort, their conversation never wandered into the arena of what else they both had in common (and I was sitting right there, hard to miss) except for a few quick playful comments when Patrick offered a cup of coffee and my friend responded wryly, “should I drink it?” In the two or so hours that followed, I both participated and observed, finding a place to perch in my memories that covered the ground between thirteen and sixty. Playing guitar at all-school masses in the gymnasium, heading off to college and registering a slight twinge of homesickness as my parents’ station wagon disappeared around the corner of the dormitory where they’d dropped me off, navigating other relationships with a good heart and a good dose of naivete, riding my bike to my job at the health food store across town, becoming a preacher, teacher and bookbinder, learning to make scones, raise goats and drive a zero-turn mower. It all fit neatly in between the alpha and omega of these two cherished men in my living room, with so much more waiting to be called up and remembered. Whuff…the richness of one life touched by two more. I can barely wrap my head around it.

I suppose that’s one of the tasks of growing older, remembering where we’ve been, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go before we get to What’s Next. I’m up for it, truly, and understand the risk of putting too soft an edge on those times that brought me to my knees. But if I fell down seven, I got up eight and fist-pumped my way to the next lesson a bit smarter (I hope—all evidence to the good, so far). These days, I find myself comfortably going to those mind-attic places, unpacking the dusty boxes and trunks of my life lived so far, and holding the contents to my chest in reverence, gratitude and love. I’m still here. I still get to collect such treasures. I am so, so lucky. It’s the refrain of my days, a soundtrack that never gets old (even as I do). And I’m not ready to start tracking “lasts” yet. Of course, anything I do as the earth rotates could be the last of its kind but I don’t want to sit in that swamp of thoughts just now. It’s rarely helpful and puts rather a damper on the party.

Here’s to the firsts still to come, to the lasts that lie safe in our hearts and all the unheralded moments in between that feed us. What a banquet, my friends. What a feast.