One Year

... and only a few trips to the emergency room later

One year ago, stepping off into the future!

It’s my wedding anniversary today and while the past wild year has not been how I thought our first year of marriage would play out, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. So in response to a reader request from some months ago I thought I’d share the story of how Paul and I met. As I told someone recently, I have discovered I have a much harder time writing about my heart than I do about the rest of my body, so I give this to you as an experiment in the third-person limited omniscient. May we all have the freedom to seek and celebrate love whenever and however we desire.

They met in a sauna. That’s the story they tell, because it’s funny and it is, technically, the truth. In the winter of 2016, they each traveled, separately, to a mutual friend’s land to the west of Chicago, for a weekend of board games, wine, and close conversation within the walls of the friend’s new wood-fired sauna. It was a good weekend, all around. Of the small party he was one of just two men, and of the two he was the quiet one, still and observant where the other man was loud and messy.  She marked this, and at one point caught his eye. A  look passed between them, but then it was gone. 

The day she left was his birthday, and he was staying out on the land for another day or two, and as she drove away she wished him well, thinking he was cute, and intriguing. Surely their paths would cross again. 

But they didn’t. And time went on and they met other people and got involved in different ways that were nice until they weren’t, and Donald Trump was elected and the world burned and they both carried on doing whatever it was they were doing, until a pandemic stopped the city in its tracks.

In June of 2020, three months into the covid shutdown, she thought it might be nice to have a conversation with someone she didn’t already know. Really, that was it. Previous attempts at online dating had yielded only a handful of creeps and disappointments, but, under duress, she went online. And there he was – that guy, from that weekend in 2016. Swiping right took some nerve. This was a real person, living in a real world that intersected with her own. But she held her breath and did it and a few hours later – or was it the next day? – a message landed in response. 

“I hope this isn’t a weird question,” it read. “But did we take a sauna together at XXXX’s once?”

It would have been a weird question, one for the creeps, if they hadn’t, but of course they had, so it wasn’t. 

They met for coffee. They went for a walk. A few days later they went on a covid-friendly picnic in the park, where they ate bahn mi and pickles and talked for many hours. “You don’t have any ex-wives hiding anywhere, do you?” she asked at one point, and he laughed and said “No, no wives, ex or current.”

Neither of them had been married. Neither had children. Neither of them even owned any property. All of these facts set them at odds with the expectations common to modern heterosexist adulthood, and each of them felt that sting from time to time, the judgement of others and the diminishments. But each of them were also, for the most part, at 52 (her) and 59 (him), at peace with this set of facts. 

At the end of the very long picnic date in the park, they sat in her backyard and had an excruciatingly long discussion about whether or not it was safe – in terms of public health, if not emotions – for them to kiss. They decided it was.

For their fourth date they went canoeing on the Wisconsin River. This was, in retrospect, a bold and optimistic decision! They drove up to Kenosha to borrow a canoe, then drove west to put in near Spring Green. That night they camped on a sandbar near a clutch of sandhill cranes, and watched the comet NEOWISE scootch across the sky. 

The next morning, as they packed the canoe, a bit of sand got in her eye. She tried to flush it out and shake it off, but as they paddled downstream it continued to burn. She was in the front of the canoe and he was in the back, so he couldn’t see the tears rolling down her cheek, but after a while he said gently, “I think we need to get you off this river.”

Over the next several hours they found an outfitter to give them a ride back to their car, drove into town to the Piggly Wiggly, and in the parking lot where she was attempting, screaming in pain, to flush her eye with a fresh bottle of saline, met an angel who appeared out of nowhere to say, “Are you OK honey? I’m a nurse.”  They followed the nurse to the small-town urgent care; she got her scratched cornea numbed up and dressed; they went for milkshakes at the A&W and then drove to Dodgeville, where they got a room at the Don Q Inn and drank room temperature beers from the pack of New Glarus he had picked up at the Piggly Wiggly in what was either panic or prescience. 

At the end of this long, unexpected day, during which he stayed preternaturally calm, she knew: this one was for real. 

He says he knew the first day, when, on their walk, they passed a serviceberry tree. Do you remember, he asked, a few years ago, when the Italian ice place had serviceberry ice? Not only did she remember, she said, she was the person who had been responsible for supplying the Italian ice stand with the berries. He jokes, though, that his true moment of certitude was really when, walking down the street, they saw a man coiling the electrical cable of his lawnmower and both cringed at his improper coiling technique, one certain to cause kinks in the cord. 

No matter – whether they were looking for a man who’s calm in a crisis or a woman who can coil cable, they were a fit. He tells that story to his students now, an object lesson in the power of proper cable handling. And every time they go to the woods or the river they remind each other: No trips to the emergency room.

They were married almost two years later, on June 4, 2022, in a park in Wisconsin whose name makes teenagers giggle, ten days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. They walked down the aisle together, too old to be given away, to the strains of the Monkees played on guitar and accordion. Both their fathers were gone, and his mother had passed just that fall. Her mother was the only parent present but they were surrounded by a flock of friends and family so strong that when the ceremony was over and they turned to face the crowd, as the band kicked into Sparks’s “All That,” a wave of joy crashed so hard over her body she had to duck her head into his shoulder and cry.

The tears didn’t last long, though, not nearly as long as the party that followed. The rain held off until they were cleaning up, the bride and groom and the helpful stragglers. And then they retreated to their rented camper in the woods – a gift from his brother and sister in law. And as outside in the dark the rain beat down, they sat on the bed surrounded by cards and gifts and well wishes and looked at each other in wonder.