Wedding invitation (watercolor on paper, 2019)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
I walk the girls to the post office box a couple of blocks away; N has written her very first letter to her beloved cousin. A queue of cars stream down the street, and one finally waits while we cross. The driver slows down as he passes us, rolling down the window. I stiffen and prepare to ignore him before realizing it’s T, my husband.
I don’t recognize him despite the fact that he looks exactly like himself and is driving my car. He rolls his eyes, used to my oblivious nature, and I laugh. I have an embarrassing habit of not recognizing anybody, including myself. I have an even poorer sense of direction; T regularly jokes that when we’re older, I’ll be lost in a field somewhere and he’ll have to come find me. I always laugh in response—after all, what would I be doing in a field?
He parks the car and comes to join us, and as the four of us walk together to mail one letter, I think about how often I’ve lost myself over the past six years of marriage. Not once have I wanted someone else to find me. I’ve only ever wanted to find a better version of me—to cast a sharp line into the deep blue sea and reel in the person I love and recognize as myself.
T has always come looking, though, even when I haven’t wanted help—or when I believed I didn’t need it, or when I knew I did but had too much pride to ask for it. We took the hard risks early on in marriage—the farm renovation; the pregnancy-and-first-child-in-Covid; Covid isolation itself; moving to a state without community or support; running two small businesses without child care; graduation school; a second child. With all of those risks came stress, boatloads of it—and we were a young couple who barely knew each other. If marriage is a job, we had no previous work experience. There was misunderstanding, confusion, large triumphs, terrible arguments. There was silence.
Letter writing is a risk. You pour your heart onto paper and walk it carefully down to the post office box. You watch the letter sail off into the great unknown. You hope it arrives safely. Each night, you wonder if it has. Your letter might be misplaced. It might be handled carelessly, dropped into a puddle. The ink smears, the love inside it lost. Or, it might arrive but be forgotten, placed on top of a to-do pile that never gets tended to. But, if you get very lucky, the person you wrote to will write you back.
Writing is reflective: the more you write, the more it reveals to you about yourself. A relationship worth having does the same.
It’s our sixth wedding anniversary today. I’m beginning to believe that my future does hold a field, and that I will someday lose myself among the cattails and willows, moon rising high above me, not knowing where I am or how I got there—and T will come looking.
If I don’t want to be found, he will keep a fair distance, making no sound, and when I’ve had my fill of solitude and quiet and pleasant loneliness, out of the darkness he’ll come, pretending he’s only just arrived. And, although I will always be someone who wants to find her own way home—I’ll be glad that he did.
TUESDAY
In our dining room hang a few paintings from grad school—paintings I made for a book I wrote and hoped would be published one day. The book was rejected by every publisher it was sent out to, which now feels more relieving than disappointing. It wasn’t ready; neither was I. What can I do? Try again, if I have the fire in my heart required to do so—and I do.
Paintings I’ve taken down and put away, for now (graphite on paper, 2023)
In the meantime, I’m also switching out the art in my home. As much as I loved these paintings when I made them, I’ve outgrown their presence in my daily life. So in a box they went, off to the basement they went, replaced by this burgeoning series of my three favorite girls:
Stay Golden or Three Sisters Establish Rule (2023)
Finding Your True North or Three Sisters Guard Their Treehouse (2025)
Maybe one day I’ll write a book about these three sisters, maybe I won’t. What I do know is how much fun it is to chronicle their growth through these paintings—and how gratifying it is to see that I’m growing, too.
WEDNESDAY
“I walk our Labradoodle, Molly, at around 4 in the morning. It’s just a habit I’ve gotten into, and the hour works well for my writing schedule. Miguel, a doorman in my apartment building, works the night shift. Dressed in his grand quasi-military uniform, he greets Molly and me, holds open the large, heavy door of the building, then stands outside in the open doorway as I walk Molly to a nearby patch of grass. I’ve never felt any danger at that hour because Miguel—who stands 6-foot-5 — watches where we go, in any weather, and waits for our safe return.
One morning, coming out of the elevator, I heard an exquisitely beautiful baritone voice singing “One Love” by Bob Marley. Not Marley’s voice but something its own. I thought the voice must be a recording, but there was no instrumental accompaniment. When I saw Miguel, I asked him, “Did you hear that singing?” He blushed and turned his big face to the side. “That was me,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.” I told him, “Don’t be sorry. You have a wonderful voice.”
There’s nothing more to the story. Miguel and I have not mentioned his singing again. But it was there, you see. The secret being inside the doorman. The other self, who sang like an angel. I hear it every time Miguel holds open the door and watches protectively. And the big man is bigger still.” —from Roger Rosenblatt’s How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)
THURSDAY
Our House (2018)
A photograph from one of our early days at our farm outside Nashville, in 2018.
One of the anniversary gifts I received from T this year: Our Miserable Life by William Steig. I already loved Steig for his wonderful picture books, especially Doctor De Soto, which I love reading with N—and I’m excited to wade into his greater depths, including cartoons and musings on the human condition, which, to Steig, is usually despair.
As Molly Young writes in this article, where she paid homage to his work with a work of her own:
“Strife was Steig’s subject. When he had trouble sleeping, he envisioned himself the owner of a magic long-range dart that he could use to destroy enemies. That’s the man in a nutshell: hellfire fury and imaginative splendor.” Indeed.
FRIDAY
Sometimes, I think you get the worst
of me. The much-loved loose forest-green
sweatpants, the long bra-less days, hair
knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow
where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed
dance on the brain. I'd like to say this means
I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt,
the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange
peels on my desk, but it's different than that.
I move in this house with you, the way I move
in my mind, unencumbered by beauty's cage.
I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me
than much else. I'm wrong, it is that I love you,
but it's more that when you say it back, lights
out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe
the first time in my life, I believe it.
—Love Poem with Apologies For My Appearance by Ada Limon
See you next week!
xx,
M
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