1973, when our love was new and our hair was brown...
Tomorrow is My Awesome Husband Greg's birthday. A while back, I was given an assignment: Write about a winter memory. I wrote this about a time when we were young, when our lives stretched out before us like a wondrous adventure. Maybe we're not so young anymore (maybe we wouldn't want to be), but the years have been good to us. I try to hold on to memories that can make me feel that way again.
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Winter doldrums are a thing, especially in Michigan, and especially when the calendar says it should be spring.
In Michigan, there is no such thing as "early" spring. Maybe a day or two to tease your senses, but winter always returns. Michigan has four seasons, and all of them are beautiful. Most of them don’t stay around long enough to wear out their welcome. Winter is Michigan’s default season. In most of my memories of Michigan, it is winter.
It was March, 1973. Winter was hanging on too long. My happy heart longed to put on spring cottons and skip in the grass with bare feet, to fill my arms with wild flower and then toss them into the air so they could rain down on my face.
I had every reason to be grass-skipping happy that year. My boyfriend, with whom I was madly in love, had asked me to marry him, and had given me a diamond ring for Christmas. But spring flowers were as much the stuff of dreams that March as the fairy tale future I envisioned for myself every time I looked at that ring on my finger.
So I sank into the doldrums. Evenings alone -- long, wintry nights, with a reception-poor television and a lamp that was barely bright enough for me to read by -- I would throw little pity parties for myself. I would sit in my cramped, dreary apartment, eating food I didn’t like, and imagine my charming Greg, laughing and flirting with co-workers and customers alike in the department store where he worked several nights a week.
Of course none of this was Greg’s fault. He always came after work, if only to kiss me good night and make sure I was okay. He was always in good humor, full of funny stories and songs to cheer me up. I’d like to say that I nobly tried to keep my blue funk a secret, but that wouldn’t be true. No, I made sure he knew that I was feeling morbidly sorry for myself.
The last thing that I could imagine brightening my mood was going out into that mean, cold air, but that is precisely what we did one snowy March day. Greg said he had something to show me.
We didn’t exactly bundle up, but we made an effort. Boots under jeans – jeans with legs so wide, it was like wearing skirts on each of our legs. The biting wind could blow straight up them, literally freezing our butts. They were long enough to cover our boots, allowing the snow through which we were trudging to wick up as far as our knees. Jackets, gloves, and we were ready for anything. The warmth that was not provided by our clothing or common sense would surely be taken care of by the indescribable love we shared, right?
After we had walked around and communed with winter for the better part of an hour, after our jeans were soaked halfway up our legs and starting to freeze, after our fingers had become so numb from the cold we couldn’t even tell if we were wearing gloves, we decided to take our adventure on the road.
As the car warmed up, we did, too. I was clueless, but Greg knew where we were going. There were several old, abandoned houses outside of town, and we pretended they were having “open houses.” Open indeed. No windows to break; that had already been done. Clearly, we were not the first “customers.” There were clothes strewn all over the empty rooms, and strange smells that I didn’t care to identify.
One of the houses on our tour -- my favorite -- had a barn. I climbed up on top of a pile of hay, where Greg took my picture, trying to look all serious and dismal like the painting of that couple with pitchforks. But the truth is that I wasn’t feeling dismal anymore. Greg, whom 42 years later, I refer to as “My Awesome Husband Greg,” knew exactly what I needed to shake the doldrums that winter. Spring came, then summer, and in the fall, we got married.
Greg may not always know what I need, but he gets it right often enough that I’m still here, ready for our next adventure.
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Happy Birthday, My Gregory. I love you forever.
