Suddenly we are in the same house at the same time.
That is the simple version. The longer version is that we built our life together around separate schedules, around the particular rhythm of two people who love each other and also have their own orbits, who come home to each other at the end of the day and that coming-home is the structure of the love, the daily returning, the reliable choosing of each other at the end of all the other choosing. We were very good at that version. We had been doing that version for a long time and it worked and we did not think much about it because things that work do not ask you to think about them.
And then I retired and we had to learn a different version.
I am not complaining. I want to say that clearly. But I am also not going to pretend it was immediately easy, the adjustment to all this together, to the shared kitchen in the morning when I used to have the kitchen to myself for the hour before anyone else was awake, to the presence of another person in the house during the hours that used to be mine to use as I needed, to the negotiation of space and time that we had not needed to negotiate before because the structure of our days had negotiated it for us.
We have been learning each other again at a different pace.
There are mornings when I look at him across the kitchen and think: I have known you for thirty years and you are still interesting to me, and I do not take that for granted, I know that is not guaranteed, I have watched enough marriages harden around each other to know that interesting is a gift you have to keep giving and receiving.
We went for a walk last week without a destination. Just out the door and down the street and left and then wherever the left led us, talking the way we talk when there is no agenda, the way we talked when we were new and the conversation was still an adventure. We walked for an hour and forty minutes. We did not realize it until we checked.
I think that is what retirement is offering us, underneath the adjustment. The time to remember that we still like each other when we are not just surviving the week together. The time to find out what we are like when we are not managing logistics and parenting and careers but just two people who chose each other, choosing each other still.
