I Married A Hurricane

For the past couple of years I’ve been deconstructing. Now I’m to the point of constructing and after a summer of thinning out the yard and house for manageability, I look around and see “I married a hurricane”.

Sometimes we must pause and look back at life to appreciate what just happened. On reflection, I married a hurricane.

This woman went in so many different directions with such intensity I don’t know how I kept up. Everything that she found interest in she became engulfed in to the point of obsession. I may not have recognize or acknowledged her efforts at the time, but I was in the eye of the hurricane.

It was a gradual change in life. The bedroom would be moved to another room. The kitchen would be taken out. The entire house would be painted.

Small little variations became more expressive ventures. Gastronomy, Handcrafting, Art, Literature, Fashion, Ornithology, Ichthyology, Botany, Origami, Ethnobiology, Anthrozoology were just a few.

A furious reader she devoured everything she could get here hands on and immediately understood the nuance. Constantly curious from a spoken phrase or a passage, she would continuously explore.

While my days were filled with my own adventure called ‘work’ with it’s own challenges, to come home was always an unexpected surprise. On Valentine’s Day she would put paper hearts out on the sidewalk from the bus stop to the front door. When M*A*S*H had it’s last episode she built a army camp in the living room complete with sheets for tents and camo-shorts and dog tags and the road signs. Even the ferrets and cats were wearing khaki t-shirts.

Not all the surprises were welcomed and the relationship was volatile at times but there were those times like being woken up in the middle of the night to walk out to a local field and lay in the dew to watch a meteor shower or getting up at 3AM to go to shoot hoops and talk out a problem.

There are probably many more women like this but she was the first one I found with such intensity. As I excavate and unravel artifacts of her efforts I must take my hat off to her determination against all odds.

So tonight which would have been our thirty-third anniversary I will sip some hot mulled cider, eat powered Danish almond cookies and marvel what she brought into my life.