A Sunday Not Sad At All

As anyone who knows me is aware of, I often wake up on Sundays very sad. Sunday is the hardest day of the week for me. I have written about this before. But today, even though it's a Sunday and the sky is rather gray, I find I am not sad at all.

It's ten thirty in the morning and Mr. Moon has already eaten his egg and cheese sandwich (and when I cracked those store-bought eggs I thought about how much nicer our own eggs are going to be, richer and bigger and with a yolk so much more yellow gold) and is out working on the coop. He's making the roosts and laying boxes now. He knows what he's doing. He's doing it. He's got power tools and he's got scrap wood and he's got tin and chicken wire and screws and nails and hammers and saws and yes, right now, he's sawing a board and the sound takes me right back to my childhood, listening to my grandfather running a saw for a project of his.

My grandfather lost all the fingers of his left hand when he was a young man in an accident with a saw. He was training to be a woodworker but with one swift, bloody mistake, that career was gone. Instead, he became a wood-buyer and traveled the country buying wood for his company. But even without those fingers, he was still able to build and craft with wood and he did. I remember his shop with its vise and its neatly arranged tools and nails and the way it smelled of sawdust and shellac. My grandfather was a very particular man and his favorite saying was, "A place for every thing and everything in its place."

I was five when my mother left my violent, alcoholic father and she fled with my brother and me down to Roseland, a little village between Vero and Melbourne where her parents lived in their retirement and we actually lived with them for awhile, before Granddaddy had a house built for us on the back-end of his property. It was a strange time, and when I think back on it, my memories are almost fairy-tale like. There were villians and ogres, magical beings and wise ones, sorrow and joy and also rivers and oceans and trees which whispered secrets to me and which I understood because I was a child. I think of lying on my back looking at clouds. I think of lying on my stomach, looking at the river beneath me. I think of lying under a tree with my eyes closed, looking at nothing, thinking of everything.
I had such huge questions about fathers and about life and about mothers and sorrow.

It seemed to me that Granddaddy had no doubts about anything. If he had questions they were on the order of, "Did you forget to put my hammer back where it belongs?" or "Did you know that mustard will put hair on your chest?"

Granddaddy was not a big man but in my mind he towers above everyone. I can see him in his safari hat, high up in a palm tree, sawing broken fronds after a storm. I can hear his tuneless whistle as he worked, a sort of constant whistle-hum, a buzz of tuneless notes. I thought he knew everything and maybe he did. I loved him but never in a million years would I have thrown my arms around him, bent his cheek to me to give him a kiss. He was not that sort of man.

But he was a good man.

I wonder if I fell in love with Mr. Moon partially because there was something in him that reminded me of Granddaddy. One of the first things Mr. Moon did when he moved in with me was to build a very tall fence around my back yard. He said it was for his dog, but I still, to this day, think it was a way to declare his possession and protection of me and my children. Not possession in a bad way. Not to keep us from the world or to keep the world out. The gate was never locked. But to say, "Here now. This is my place to protect. This the outline of the world I have decided to take care of."
Did the sound of that saw ripping through boards and the smell of the sawdust which resulted influence my heart on the matter of this man?
I think it did.

I saw in him what I had seen in my grandfather- an ability to focus, a willingness to take on responsibility and yes, a way with a saw and a hammer and wood.
But whereas Grandfather was unable to show affection, Mr. Moon's arms were hardly ever, in those days, not wrapped around me whenever possible. And when I met HIS father, I saw where Mr. Moon's heart had come from, where those loving arms had come from, where his ability with wood had come from, where his sense of responsibility had come from and I knew those roots went deep and would not disappear over time.
I was right.

Funny how I seem to keep writing about my husband lately. Well, that's okay.
I write what I want. No one is paying me to do this. Besides, I'm writing about my grandfather, too. I'm writing about why we fall in love with people. I'm writing about what happens when the days of brand new lust are just a lovely memory and what keeps you in love after that flame has been tamped down into a fire of still-glowing coals, more useful for their having burned down, still hot enough to warm what needs warming, to flair up when a strong breeze hits them. Especially if you keep feeding that fire with fuel and oxygen.

My granddaddy gave my grandmother, upon their engagement, a lovely diamond ring. The diamond was quite large but he could afford it because there was a visible flaw in it. A tiny seedlike shape of black, lodged within the white, fiery stone.

When I graduated from nursing school, my mother gave me that ring and five years ago, Mr. Moon took the ring and had two more stones set beside it in a platinum band and gave it to me as an anniversary present. It was so stunning and so dramatic that when I opened the tiny box in my favorite restaurant in the world- the Ocean Grille, in Vero Beach- that I couldn't stop laughing. Me? Wear such a thing? It shot off sparks in the restaurant, it practically stood up and sang the Hallelujah Chorus.

I wear it now. Granny's stone in the middle, my own, Mr. Moon-given stones flanking it in protection.
I wear it when I garden, when I cook, when I kiss my husband.
I will wear it when I feed the chickens.
We give significance to the things in our lives. They do not spring from nowhere, these significances. The sound of a saw cutting through wood, the smell of sawdust and the smell of a man who has been working with his hands outside. The sparkle and weight of a diamond ring.

It's Sunday and Mr. Moon is working on the chicken coop. The chicks are outside in their box, right beside where he is working, happily stretching their wings and taking short flights, bumping into each other and scratching for bugs as he builds their future home, as he builds something that will make this place where we live even more of a home.

It is Sunday and I am happy. It is Sunday and the chicks are growing.
It is Sunday and I wear three large diamonds on my left hand. They are made of carbon, compressed and turned to something beautiful and very, very hard by time and heat and whatever magic it is that makes diamonds. One of them still has a piece of that carbon within it. I like that. It's not a perfect stone in that you can see this "flaw," this seed of what made it.
But that makes it more perfect to me because it allowed my grandfather to buy it, to give it to my granny before they married and had children which led to me being here, writing this on my back porch on a Sunday where I am happy in this place where I live with this man that I love as he saws, as he hammers, as he works.

It is Sunday and I am not sad at all.