Bill and I started a puzzle after supper to relax from a busy week and to detox from the evening news and media feeds. We almost finished the picture in two evenings except for the last twenty or so sky pieces. I will admit that for me working on same-color background of a puzzle is right up there in frustration with untangling the knots in a tiny gold chain necklace. I just can’t do it!
So this morning, while Bill went for the sky, I began my reading of materials that demand a morning mind.
I’m a writer, so my work and discipline is reading all kinds of writing by great authors and poets, essayists and historians that stretch, engage, and challenge my own writer-mind. Morning is also the time that Bill and I discuss great ideas, issues of the day, and things that bring us great joy, like our grandkids and our Cavalier dog Windsor, who pulls his bed between Bill’s chair on one side of the kitchen and mine on the other. He loves a good discussion!
This particular morning, Bill had a late morning appointment at his office, but before he left for that, he started a fire in the kitchen fireplace beside my reading place, piled up enough firewood to keep the fire going through my morning study and took Windsor out between the patches of winter rain that was predicted to go on all day.
Bill and I are both poets and romantics; both of us love music and candlelight. I love beauty and flowers and chocolate as much as anyone I know. And it’s almost Valentine’s Day. If I know Bill after all these years, he will likely have a dozen multi-colored roses delivered to our door on Valentine’s Day and I will make his favorite dinner, put on some soft music, and light the candles on the table. At bedtime, he will probably light candles in the bedroom and turn on some classical music.
But whether flowers and favorite foods, candlelight and music make our love gentle and beautiful depends as much on the morning as the night. His completing the sky, keeping the fire going, taking Windsor out in the rain, and us both sharing ideas over a second cup of coffee is as much “making love’ as the tender holding of each other in candle light.
For the last couple of months, the Vocal Band has been recording a collection of classic love songs. The harmonies and melodies of these songs are break-my-heart beautiful, and they have never been sung as meaningfully and these guys sing them. A couple of weeks ago all five of the wives came to witness these songs being video recorded at our studio. Singing these songs to the women with whom they have committed to spend the rest of their lives brought a whole new authenticity to the love songs they were singing. It definitely was a day of “more than the music.”
At one point in the day, Bill asked the guys “Will you still sing to your sweetheart when you both are old?” We all then had a discussion about what exactly is “intimacy”? With the exception of Bill and me, these couples are young and beautiful. They are rearing children in various stages of development and are caught up in the mainstream of life. Will these marriages withstand the pressures of life? Will these families stay intact as they weather the storms of life that will inevitably come? And what is beauty after all?
Bill and I just celebrated our sixtieth anniversary. What had brought us to this milestone still loving each other, as the definition of loveliness and beauty gathered new shades of meaning along the way?
I can only say that through sunshine and rain, this man has gotten more “beautiful” to me one fire at a time, one kindness at a time, one forgiveness at a time, one respected idea at a time. The patience to finish the sky when the picture is incomplete, to bring a hot cup of coffee so life can go on, and to offer so many other loving gestures on life’s wintry, cold and rainy days has made our lives together and each other, well, beautiful.
