Today is our 31st wedding anniversary, though we've been a pair for about 35 years. We met at age 19, got together at 21, married at 26, had babies at 29 and 33 . . . and now here we are, 57 years old, still listening to 70s funk together, still quarreling over cribbage supremacy, still eating cold shrimp on a hot night.
Despite our many years together, yesterday was the first night we ever spent air-conditioned in our own home. And I was glad to have it. The temperature hit 90 yesterday and will be nearly as hot today. Still, for the moment I've turned off the machine. I missed the open windows, the sounds of the gulls and the passersby. Being cool requires being in a bubble, and I get enough of that isolation during the winter. One of the reasons I love summer is because it softens the barrier between inside and out. Still, there's much to be said for not melting into a puddle by 10 a.m.
Like yesterday, today will be schizophrenic. I'll be exercising and editing and writing in my machine-cooled room. I'll also be outside in the sticky heat hanging laundry and watering the gardens. Tonight T and I will go out to dinner, at a place on the West End we've only been to once before but that we remember with delight. All things considered, we are mostly pretty happy together. All things considered, I am pretty lucky.
“I would not have been a poet” (Wendell Berry)
ReplyDelete(from This Day: Sabbath Poems, 1994: VII)
I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves,
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.
Happy Anniversary : )
May today be joyous and the future be splendiferous!
ReplyDelete💜🙏🏻👏🏼🙋🏼♀️🥂🍤😻
Please accept my ditto of what Ruth has said so..."splendiferously." Happy anniversary, Dawn and Tom.
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