Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. ~ Paul Boese

I've been married to this man for a long time.  37 years, to be exact.  I met him on a blind date.  When I opened the door to let him and our mutual friends into my parents' house for the first time he almost blew me away.  He had long dark brown hair that cascaded halfway down his back.  He wore a leather jacket, jeans, and boots.  He had the most piercing brown eyes I'd ever gazed into.  I was in speechless awe.  At the end of the evening, after he and our friends had dropped me off at my parents', he told our friends, "Someday I'm going to marry that girl".  They laughed him to scorn.  5 months and 4 days later, he made those words true.

You learn a lot about another person after being with them for close to 4 decades.  I sometimes feel as if I know him better than he does himself.  But that isn't true.  There are parts of each of us that are never revealed to the world around us.  But I do know the important things about him.  I know he's a man of impeccable integrity.  I know he's honest and true.  I know his strengths and his weaknesses.  He has proven to me many times that he's in this for the long run, 'til death do us part.  He has been with me in good times and hard times.  He has stayed by my side when I've been very ill, so devoted that even the nursing staff has commented to me how lucky I am to have someone who loves me so much.  They have seen many women dumped off at the hospital, the husband never to be seen again until he comes to pick them up to take them home.  Dear Hubby has been an awesome father to our two children...and still is.  And I don't think there is a Papa in the world who could be loved by his grandchildren as much as he is by our two grandsons.

For a life change as huge as the one we've undergone these past few months, learning of a possible move to Michigan from Oregon around the first part of November last year and then making it so in March of this year, it's gone remarkably well.  We hit a pretty big bump in the road when we first arrived in Michigan, only to find a mortgage mess of - to us - catastrophic proportions.  We ended up living in a hotel suite for over two weeks while everything got sorted out.  Beyond that, it's been pretty seamless.  We've settled in and already grown to love our new home and surroundings.  But Dear Hubby and I began sniping at each other, a little here, a little there.  We were irritable and short-tempered.  Instead of doing what we've always done in the past by talking such things thru, we let it fester.  With all the adjustments to a new home, a new city, a new state, and a completely new job for him I don't know if we weren't aware of what was happening or if we were too distracted to give it much thought.

It came to a head a week ago.

We sat out on our porch on that Saturday morning.  Grumpy.  Not very talkative.  And then Dear Hubby opened up like a dam and let all his frustrations, his hurts, pour out of him.  I sat and listenend in rather stunned silence, letting him say his piece, mulling over all that he had to say.  And I found myself agreeing with him.  I told him it was too bad he hadn't opened up sooner instead of bottling it all up inside.  But I'd done the same thing.  So after talking these issues thru we decided we'd start from square one, from that point forward, and put all our grievances and gripes behind us and move on.  We also agreed if we saw ourselves falling back into that rut, to point it out to the other one and change it right then.

You see, communication is the secret to a happy marriage. 

We have had many people say to us thru the years, "If you guys could bottle up what you have and sell it you'd be billionaires".

There's no bottling up of any secret formula.  There's no magic elixir.  What there is is the want-to to make this relationship work.  It's mutual respect.  It's realizing that my opinion, my feelings, are only half of a whole.  His are the other half.  It is leaving selfishness behind at the marriage altar.  It is a building process, one day at a time.  It is what you make of it.  It doesn't just happen.

There is no white knight in shining armor, coming to sweep you away.

If you're lucky, as I have been lucky, you find a good man you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. ~ Auguste Rodin

40 years ago my parents and younger brother and I vacationed in the little town of Waldport on Alsea Bay in Oregon.  A quiet little burg along Highway 101.  It wasn't one of the more popular tourist towns, tucked back from the Pacific Ocean.  We'd rented a cabin-style unit in an older motel for four days.  It wasn't a vacation I  wanted to go on.  I was 17, my younger brother 11.  My parents were going thru some particularly hard years in their marriage and the air in the cabin was thick with tension and bickering.

My brother and I escaped to the long stretch of beach that skirted the bay.  The tides came and went with a quiet ferocity.  There was no surf...we could spot that off in the distance at the mouth of the bay.  But sea lions bobbed about when the tide was high.  Sea birds skittered and cried overhead.  We skipped rocks out across the smooth surface of the water.  For siblings with 6 years between us, we got along remarkably well.

Towards the late afternoon of the second day there, we befriended two brothers and their sister.  They had shrimp guns and we amused ourselves by screwing them down into the wet sand and extracting small sand shrimp.  Nothing worth eating.  We might've built a sand castle.  But as the sky was streaked with apricot orange and pink sherbet and we were standing together in a circle looking down at the shrimp gun, another pair of bare feet entered into our tight orbit.  My gaze moved upward until I found myself staring into the most incredible pair of golden brown eyes I'd ever seen.  They belonged to one of the most handsome young men I'd ever encountered.  We stood transfixed as that moment in time stopped for the length of a heartbeat.  Sound didn't register.  We created our own vacuum.  And when he said, "Let's go take a walk" we headed off down the shore.  One of the brothers yelled, "Hey, where you going?" but I didn't look back.

I don't know what my father sensed.  He'd been standing there off to the side.  But when my younger brother began to run after us Dad called him back and told him to leave us alone.  And when the two of them headed back to the cabin no one called for me to follow.  I stood in the cool wind as the sun went down and became acquainted with my soul mate.

It wasn't love.  What teenage encounter at that age is real love?  But until the moment he entered into our circle I had still been a tomboy girl.  I'd had no serious crushes.  And this wasn't a crush.  It went deeper than that.  Is there such a thing as chance encounters, or does everything that happens to us in our lifetime happen for a purpose?  Was he there to help me cross the chasm from childhood into the moment when I became fully aware of myself as a young woman?  I don't know.  But I do know it was magical.  We sat up half the nite, hunkered down against the sea wall to block the cold wind blowing in from the sea.  We never kissed.  We never even held hands.  But he told me, "If I were to die right now it would be ok because I'd know you were still here in the world."

As this memory came to my mind tonite I remembered his name.  I did a Google search on him and it surprised me he was even real.  And he is alive and hopefully well somewhere in southern California where he is a high school teacher of Fine Arts.  That seems very fitting for him.  He had the soul of a poet.

And I will leave it there.  I have no desire to contact him.

But he will always remain the apparition who seemed to flow in on the tide.  Who made a young girl feel pretty and worthy of the attention of a handsome young man for the first time in her life.