Marriage measurements

Well, the shoe has finally dropped. H is here full time. He has spent much of the day traveling between the garage and the sheds with wheelbarrow loads of cardboard and boxes of audio and video tapes that we haven't watched in more than 5 years and probably won't ever again. But I am loathe to give them up. Yet. My default answer to his question about hitting the delete key on my "stuff" is: "not yet." I am feeling a kid with the terrible twos. I suppose we will get through it intact, but we are beginning to establish something of a pattern, and in this case, it is "my bad." He has given away the couch and the microwave and the toaster. He left pots and pans and dishes and cutlery behind. He has a box of clothes for the Goodwill. And I have been holding onto what remains in the garage after truck loads of stuff got dumped or auctioned off. Now, I am sort of like a stuck record (remember those?), and "no" is my stock answer.

In any case, it is a more fluid time than it seems on its face.

Both of us have suddenly committed to moving our bodies and are finding that we can still do it. There was no moment of discovery, no gestalt, that started me walking, other than a felicitous encounter with a pair of shoes that turned me from hobbling like an 85 year old, to someone who walked 4.5 miles today!!!! (Wait! Is that your applause I hear?)

We have both started eating better, and we are cooking at home rather than going out for beer and chips or Indian food or pizza. (Convenience foods are so.......convenient!)

We have been drafting documents for the new business though not at what I would call a lightning pace...but they are good I think, truly good.

And we are both having these odd little moments that underline the fact that two married people are living in the same place at the same time. And that is HUGE after years of commuter life.

There is a small dressing area / closet between our bathroom and the bedroom.  I have one side and his shirts are hanging in the other. (He is much neater about the way his clothes are arranged.)

His shoes are covered in grass from walking around outside after mowing. Normally, he would have cleaned them so that they would be grass free when he put them on before heading back to Boston for the week's work.

He did the wash. I did the drying. He picked blueberries for cobbler that we served to friends. I picked peas. Instead of heading upstairs to work (which he did later), he went outside with a friend to help load the Hava-hart trap onto his truck so that we could relocate its resident to a new home. (The groundhog turned out to be a very confused grey squirrel.) 

Instead of going to the "Heads Meeting" last Tuesday, we talked to the guys who were pumping our septic tank.

And the work is turning out to find its own level. We have set up two desks in the office upstairs, one for each of us. I still have my writing nook downstairs off the dining room where I work in silence, but eventually I will be doing email and bills up there, close to the filing cabinets. H got new converter plugs so that his laptop can work off the large monitor he has set up, and he does his writing to music.

These odd little moments feel more like a marriage than I would have expected. I paid the young man who did some weed whacking the other day by giving him a check; H came in from outside a few minutes later and said, "You could have given him cash from my wallet." It was stunning. (OK maybe not stunning, but a surprise.)

We haven't resolved all the problems of two people living together at our tender ages and with our not-so-tender histories, but there is something surprising and rather endearing about these moments. When a  young friend got married a few years ago, I organized a women's-wisdom-shower for her, in which some of the middle-aged and senior ladies she knew provided nourishment. Some of that had nothing to do with food.

One woman who has been married for decades said, "you can be right or you can be married." Another talked of her new bride concerns about her husband's size. Her friends, she said, didn't want to talk about it. We all worried about what she was about to reveal. "Finally, I figured it out," she said. "I bought king sized sheets for the bed, so neither of us would be cold!" 

I have held on to that women's wisdom for several years now, though H and I were barely a glimmer in the eye on that afternoon. I remember much of what was shared....but one thing no one told me then was that marriage could also be measured in the sharing of the wallet and the closet, and grass on the soles of the shoes.