Fifty Three

My Dearest Love,

Fifty-three years ago this day, you came into the world. Not quite a year and a half ago, you departed. Today, I spent much of my time remembering our time together, which, if tallied up, would have occupied almost half of your time on this plane. That is a lot of time to share, and to remember.

Your children are doing fine. Your daughter is in her last year of high school and can barely constrain her impatience to be done with it. Your son is not far behind with the same disdain for the daily chain gang activities called school.

Your dog and I grow more grizzled with the passing of time. We are mirrors of one another, still spry for our age, but slowing. Today, we went for a long walk in order to think of you and to enjoy the turning of the seasons. We walked through the woods on one of our most familiar paths, but at one junction, we took a newer trail that led down to the marsh at the south end of the lake that you and I used to paddle out on to conduct water testing.

There is a new boardwalk across the top of the marsh that allows one to walk clear to the other side without slogging through mud and water, though the dog seemed puzzled that anyone would want to do it that way. Once on the other side, we followed a newly graveled path up the east side of the lake and past new houses and the growl of monstrous machineries busy with the forming of new landscapes.

You would be proud of all of this having set it all in motion before you left. Your last and biggest project continues to move on and develop. The assisted living development is moving into it's next stages and single family homes are appearing to the south along the lake shore.

The path we walked upon sits lower down and out of sight of the majority of the construction activity. I walked along with my hands jammed down in my pockets for warmth as the dog ranged far and wide in her search of scent and possible tidbits to be found for a quick munch. I was lost in my thoughts as I strode along, thinking of you and of the things we did.

I remembered how it was when we first met and I used to see you in a mirror and how your face looked so different with your features reversed from side to side. I remembered making love in the back bedroom of your apartment with the windows open and the rain falling on the leaves of the trees in the spring of our first life.

I remembered being poor students, living in the urban jungle where the police cars and cockroaches were unwelcome parts of our days and nights. I remembered the moment I asked you to marry me and you said yes.

I remembered the shotgun apartment we had in the old part of St. Paul where we once had my family over for new year's and my mother had us all in stitches as she tried to act out the motions of a train locomotive to convey the image of "engine" as part of her charades draw of John Lennon's song "Imagine."

In that same apartment, I remembered an argument that we had that resulted in me stalking out to one of the other rooms and unfolding the futon couch to sleep and how we didn't talk for two days. For the life of me, I cannot remember what we disagreed about.

Then there was the giant rat that my mother thought was a squirrel, seen from the other end of the apartment. That was one of the last memories I have of that apartment before we moved to our first ever house, that wonderful old Queen Anne Victorian that we put so much love and labor into. It was that house that we brought our two children into. It was that house that saw our biggest marital divide. It was that house in which we learned I had cancer.

Do you remember the time I painted the picket fence around your garden with a paint sprayer? You were so pissed at me for getting speckles of white paint all over your vegetables. Then there was the time you had your reunion and your rich cousin flew in on his very own plane and I thought we were going to have blood shed over who was going to go to the airport to transport him and his retinue back to the house.

I remember the sadness I felt at leaving that house for a newer one in the northern suburbs because there were too many drive-bys in the neighborhood and we needed to be in a newer house closer to your sister who did our day care in case I got sick and you would have to take care of me.

I remembered how you were elected president of the home owners association in that newer house and how for the Fourth of July Celebration picnic that year, you organized a pie eating contest and we stayed up practically the whole night before making all of the fruit pies for the contest, and what a hilarious and successful contest it was with all of the major players in the neighborhood up to their ears in slushy, juicy, blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry pies. You always had a knack for getting the high and mighty to come down and hobnob with the rest of us.

I remembered all of the work we put into that house as well and how after seven or eight years, we had it just about how we wanted it, and how much we had grown to love our little community on the lake and how life was feeling pretty good when you came home one day and asked if I would consider moving.

It seems you had been offered the job of your dreams and could give up that ulcer-producing daily commute. You could finally do all of the things you had been dreaming of. All we had to do was to leave our little community for a short move east of a mile or two into a much different kind of community, a new and different life. I never considered saying no.

And that's how we came to where we are now - living a much different life than when we were poor students in the ghetto. We live in the woods, surrounded by trees and deer, fox and wild turkeys. It was here, just as you were settling into your dream job, getting your biggest and most ambitious plans established, nurturing them past the pitfalls that plague projects such as these, that you learned of your own disease. What irony we have known. What angst. What love.

So, today, I remembered you and our life together. Your children miss you as do I, but we are all getting on. Your daughter is beautiful and brilliant. Your son is growing wildly and I never know how tall he will be every morning when he comes up for breakfast.

I am slowly returning to the land of the living after a long sojourn in a time of darkness. I am lifting my head and thinking of the future. I am making plans for the next stage of our lives. I think of you always. I wonder at where you are and what you are seeing. I often look at pictures of the universe and all of the beauty that can be found in the stars and imagine you out there, sharing in the brilliance and majesty that can be found there.

Happy birthday, my love.