We are getting older together and this is not a small thing.
There was a time when getting older together was not guaranteed, when the together was still being decided, when I did not know if we would be the kind of couple who made it to this side of the hard middle years, who came out the other side still choosing each other, still finding each other worth the daily work of a long marriage, which is a particular kind of work that nobody tells you about when you begin, that has no description in the books because the books are about the beginning and this is what comes after the beginning, after the children and the years and the things that changed each of you in ways the other had to accept and sometimes could not accept immediately and came to accept eventually because love in a long marriage is also patience, is also the willingness to wait for the person to become who they are becoming and love them through the becoming.
We are older now.
The bodies are older, which we acknowledge with the particular humour of two people who have been watching each other’s bodies for a long time and find the changes both alarming and funny, which is the only sane response to the changes, which are real and which are not the whole of the story. The minds are older too, in the good ways, in the ways that accumulation produces, in the deeper knowing and the shorter patience with the trivial and the quicker recognition of what actually matters, which is each other, which has always been each other, which is clearer now that the noise has reduced.
We went for a walk last Sunday in the early morning.
Not because there was somewhere to be. Because it was Sunday and the morning was good and we wanted to be in it together. We have been going for walks together since the beginning and the walks have changed as we have changed, have been fast and then slow and then fast again and now slow again, slow in the good way, in the way of two people who are not going somewhere but being somewhere, who have learned that being-somewhere is the destination, who are in the morning walk the way I am trying to be in everything now, all the way in, nowhere else.
I looked at him on the walk and thought: thirty years.
Thirty years of this person beside me. And the thirty years are in his face now the way they are in mine, written in by the same seasons, and I know his face the way I know the route, completely, and I find it still interesting, which is the whole of what I was hoping for when we began, which is more than I had any right to count on and which I count, every walk, as a gift.
