39 Years and Counting – Day 229

28 June 1980

39 Years and Counting       

I look at that post title and, just like when I had my birthday back in March, I think, “Wow. How did we get here?”

Birthdays and anniversaries. Markers of the passage of time.

Karl and I were married at 10:00 a.m. on June 28, 1980. And lucky for us, at 10:00 a.m. on June 28, 2019, we were sitting together on a rock that juts into the flowing waters of the Tohickon Creek.

Transported from one sacred place to another in, what only in retrospect, feels like the blink of an eye. The living of it sometimes felt like time was moving ever so slowly; so slowly that it felt like yearned-for change would never actually happen. And other times, the living of it felt like the rug, the very fabric of our lives, was being pulled out from under us. Irrevocable, instantaneous, radical change.

At Karl’s Gathering – Photo: Ellen Naughton

Through these past 39 years (and more, actually, since we met three years earlier), the one constant in my life has been Karl. Through education achievements, career changes, sudden death of a parent, depression, births of children, longer, more prolonged sicknesses and deaths of parents, spiritual discoveries, soccer tournaments, track meets, musicals, graduations, disappointments, college admissions, Siberia, initiations, sudden death of a(n adult) child, weddings, joys, walks…

It’s been us.

The loneliest times in my life have been when there’s been discord between us. Those were the times when I most deeply questioned everything.

Gratitude for the Luck – and the Choices We’ve Made

Given the particular professions I engage in, I’m acutely aware of how much work it’s been for us to remain a true, working partnership and best friendship through thick and thin. But I’m even more aware of how lucky we are. So much of what we’ve endured could have easily torn us asunder. But each of us, at critical junctures, chose to stay. We chose to talk. We chose to take a walk instead of storming out and staying away, perhaps pouring our souls out to someone other than each other. We chose to listen.

We chose to forgive. We chose to have compassion.

We also, as one friend reminds us every once in a while because she simply could not believe it when she ran into us laughing and joking in the parking lot of our local grocery store – chose to enjoy crazy things like renting a carpet cleaner to steam clean our rugs together.

“It’s the little things,” we said, laughing at how odd we must’ve seemed.

I do so very much love those little things we share. And the big ones. But most of all, I’m grateful to have Karl sharing them – all – with me.

At Tohickon Creek – 28 June 2019 – Photo: L. Weikel

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