Deja Vu All Over Again

Last night I was knitting. Didn't I tell you? I've taken up the hobby again, after twenty plus years of thinking I had better things to do with my time. Such as, writing, reading, cooking, cleaning, laundry, walking, gardening, dancing, gym-going....and all those years chauffeuring my children to and fro. Then there was the working too. First, doing some semi-social work, then coding for the family business, and finally writing, for an old fashioned newspaper deadline. Let's not forget being the go-to volunteer for all things school or temple, heading a committee or two, sitting on a few boards. In short, I was pretty busy in all the usual American ways of over-scheduling. I'd consigned knitting to that most ancient list of activities: the time I spent learning to weave on a loom; my quilting phase in the Berkshires; sewing tiny elephants together for crib toys as newborn presents. Yes, I admit it, I was pretty crafty back in the day when children were little and there was time on my hands. Last night, I was thinking about my first published newspaper article. It was back when we were newly marrieds and I had a baby (aka as The Bride) on my hip. I wrote about the paradox of my life in the country - about my husband putting together his first PC, lugging it up the stairs, while I was stoking the Vermont Castings wood stove. In a big hair '80s way, I asked the proverbial question, "Whatever happened to clean heat?"

So, while knitting away on my newly learned cable pattern in my 'not so big' mountain home, some thirty years later, I had the same epiphany. It was the juxtaposition of events after dinner in front of the flat screen. Our house was toasty warm after pushing a button to light the gas fireplace. I glanced over at my man on the couch who had become very quiet, when it hit me. He was deep in concentration on his Ipad! Here we were, almost thirty years later, in the same time-warp conundrum, but my reaction was quite different.

Back then, I ranted about having to keep the stove going day and night, the sound of guns in the woods while he was out there felling trees, the black ice, the mountain lion our German Shepherd treed. Memoir-like, thoughts of my foster father appeared, with his coal stove in my childhood dream home of Victory Gardens. The smoke and the mess of keeping a home fire burning in the Reagan years was eclipsed by a form of acceptance now. We are not so newly married and I no longer cringe when he finishes my sentences. His shoulders are shot from chopping and hauling logs, and my fingers are getting arthritic, like my Mother's. But we've managed to maintain this thing called marriage with a sense of wonder about our lives. I look over at the father-of-the-bride and think to myself, we did it!

A woman at a holiday party recently asked me where he went at one point, and I looked back at her and said, "I don't know." We are not prone to keep the other informed of our whereabouts at all times. But I had to smile remembering the quote under my high school yearbook picture. How to make a marriage last? Simple, it's realizing that they will always be right there through thick and thin beside you, whenever it counts.