Hunting and Gathering

So. The new bow works. There is the body of a doe, skinned and gutted, on ice somewhere in the garage. Mr. Moon is very smart in that he does not ask me to participate in the deer hunting process AT ALL. He doesn't say, "Come look at my dead deer!" He doesn't ask me to hold the flashlight while he skins it. He does not ask me to bury the guts. In fact, he allows me to pretend that he came upon the deer meat, all wrapped in white paper and labeled "back strap" while in the woods.
He even washes his hunting clothes himself.

This is a good man.

And I try to reciprocate by cooking his deer meat in a respectful and delicious manner.

When I met Mr. Moon I had never dated a man who was anything like him at all. Seriously.

First off, his height. Six feet, ten inches. Honeychile, that's tall. I stand five feet, four and a half inches in a good day. This means that when I hold his jeans up to fold them, they come to my chestular area. Uh-huh. Really. He has a thirty-eight inseam. And I'm not going to even tell you how big his shoes are.

Secondly, he was a jock. He'd played basketball all through high school and college and he'd played some pro ball in Europe and when I met him, he played Ultimate Frisbee. All of the men I'd ever dated considered loading amps to be their main form of physical activity.
This meant that Mr. Moon was formed in a somewhat godlike fashion when it came to his physical being which was a novelty for me. Loading amps doesn't build muscle the way playing basketball or Ultimate Frisbee does. Funny, huh?

Thirdly, while I was, and am to this day, an avid reader, Mr. Moon did not ever even consider once in his life picking up a book to read recreationally. This was beyond understanding to me. I mean...no reading? Oh, he could pick a contract apart like a lawyer but when it came to reading for pleasure, it was not part of his reality.

Fourthly (is that a word?), he hunted. With a gun. Wearing hunting clothes.
Huh?
I was practically a vegetarian. The culture clash of an almost-vegetarian and a hunter was huge. I remember looking at the man pulling the feathers from some sort of small bird he'd bagged IN MY KITCHEN and thinking, "Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into?"

We're about to celebrate our 24th anniversary though so I suppose it's all worked out. He eats tofu on occasion now and I cook a mean venison chili. It makes me feel secure to have a freezer full of white packages labeled "back strap" and "loin" and "roast," not to mention "grouper," "snapper," and "flounder."

We both love to work in the garden and eat what comes out of that, too.

I still read voraciously and he now listens to books on tape that I get him from the library.

And most importantly, I think, our family is the most important thing in the world to both of us.

And he makes me laugh and he makes me feel safe and he's the hardest working man I've ever met. And despite the fact that he sells used cars, he's the most honest man I've ever met as well.

And thank God he's a Democrat. Phew. That would have been a deal-breaker for sure.

We take care of each other, Mr. Moon and I, in the best ways we know how. We've learned to live with our differences and we've come to respect the very things in each other that are the most different.

I don't know how you can get much better than that.

Except, oh yeah, the fact that we love each other tremendously.

On Thursday we're going to head down to Vero Beach to stay for a few days to celebrate our anniversary and I'm looking forward to that. He can take his fishing poles and fish the Sebastian Inlet and I can walk on the beach. And we can spend a lot of time together doing not a lot of much and I think we're going to have a lovely time. We'll eat our anniversary dinner at the Ocean Grill which is where that picture of us was taken about a million years ago.

I still have that dress.

I still have that man.

And a deer on ice.

Ain't I lucky?

Valentines And Other Follies Of The Human Heart

"Without love, you are nothing."

That was the sign posted on a church marquee that my husband and I saw as were driving home from the airport on Sunday night.

"Good Lord," I said. "As if being alone on Valentine's Day wasn't enough, now churches are telling people that without love they are nothing."
"I don't think they were talking about that sort of love," he said.
"Well, it didn't say what sort of love," I replied. "It just said love. I can see some poor lonely person reading that sign and deciding to just go sit on a railroad track until a train came along to put them out of their misery."
"Huh," he said.

Valentine's Day is a screwy holiday if you ask me. From the earliest days of grade school when the pretty, popular girls got the good Valentines that came in the punch-out Valentine's card kits and I got the stupid dumb ones because I was fat and the teacher's pet, it's been nothing but a soul-sucking disappointment to me.

I've been in love with the man I'm married to for twenty-three years and we never, ever get Valentine's Day right. Last year we decided to just cook something on the grill, have a drink and let that be it. I'm sure I cooked something special to go with whatever was going on the grill (my memory- it's a sad, sad loss) but by the time the grill got cranked up and the meat was done, we'd had too much of the drink and I was in tears and had taken the opportunity to do what I do best, which is to get psychotic.

"There's no more romance in our relationship!" I wailed.

"What?" said my husband, standing there with the platter of high-dollar meat that we surely didn't even need unless you're talking about the fact that it was food and I certainly needed to eat something.

"You used to pursue me. When you met me you were all about the romance. Then you caught me and that was that. That's all you needed to do. Now I'm like one of these," and here I nodded towards one of the many deer-heads on the wall. "Just, a thing."
"What are you talking about?" he asked.

And I had no idea, quite honestly. He doesn't treat me like a thing at all but I suppose that because dinner was late and I'd had one martini too many and he didn't buy me something from Tiffany's, I had determined that I was now nothing more than a dead trophy, stuck on a wall.

And if the truth be known, there is probably nothing any man can do that will proclaim his love for his woman (or a woman for her man or a man for his man or a woman...okay, you know what I'm saying) on one specific day of the year that shows the depths and breadths of his love.

Okay. Maybe if he surprised his love with a trip in a private jet to Paris where he had made reservations at some amazing restaurant and on board was a beautiful new couture dress that fit her perfectly because he knew every inch of her beloved body, along with a small token of his love in the form of platinum and diamonds for her to wear to dinner and bottles of wine and small perfect little bites of the most delicious food on earth to nibble on before they got to dinner and, well, yeah, maybe that would do it.

But short of that, how can anyone come through on Valentine's Day? Because the purpose of the day is supposedly to show the one you love just how MUCH you love them and that can't be done with flowers, candy, dinner reservations or even jewelry, although in my book, jewelry can come close.

Nah. It's not Valentine's Day where we prove our love.

It's every other day of the year when we prove it by earning the money and cleaning the toilets and thanking each other for doing these things. It's coming home every night and it's making dinner every night and it's going together to meet with the wedding caterer for the daughter's wedding. It's saying "I love you" at the end of every phone conversation and it's holding each other's hands during a funeral as tears run down your faces.

It's taking your mother wood for her fireplace and it's saying, "Sure honey, go fishing this weekend." Or hunting or going off to visit a friend or coming to see you in a play.

It's lying down together at the end of every day and saying, "I love you," again because you can't say it too much.

It's being together every minute for ten days and nights on a vacation and then getting back and realizing that you miss him when he goes to work and where is your best friend, your lover, your buddy to play with?

It's standing up in front of friends under a clear blue sky on a beautiful October day and saying "I do," to all sorts of crazy promises that you have no idea what the implications of are and it's creating a family and working insane hours and raising children and going to school plays together and it's having problems and it's staying and doing the hard work and making it better.

It's seeing each other age and not letting that get in the way and it's planning for the future and it's living in the day.

It's shared jokes that go back decades and memories, too, of crazy times and funny times and good times and rotten times and times you wouldn't repeat for all the money in the world and times you keep in your heart in a velvet-lined box and only open up and look at once in a while because they're so beautiful that you don't want to wear them out.

It's changing the oil in the car and it's planting camellias together and it's putting in a spring garden and it's shoveling chicken shit. It's being patient and tolerant and it's using good manners when that's the only thing that'll get you through something. It's acting sillier than you'd ever want your kids to know their parents act and it's being respectful even when you don't understand.

It's not walking out the door when the other one gets psychotic and starts wailing about romance.

It's about putting flax seed in his smoothie so he'll live forever and it's knowing that neither one of us will. It's about listening to his breath and his heartbeat and knowing that one day one of us will be there when the other one's breath and heartbeat cease and it's holding each other closer because of that knowledge.

Love is about all of those things and it's about dreams and reality and fantasy and hope and despair and joy and death and having someone to hold tight to through all of that. It's about someone to share it all with.

And by golly, it may not be true that there is nothing without love but it's knowing that it's easier, it's sweeter, it's a blessing beyond compare to have it.

And even though I know all of this, I know myself and that I will have a small breakdown tomorrow because we haven't planned anything for Valentine's. We haven't made dinner reservations, we haven't planned a get-away, and I seriously doubt any jewelry's been bought.
Which is not to say he hasn't bought me plenty of jewelry over the past two decades. He's bought me enough jewelry for a lifetime.

And he also chose not to take a bulkhead seat on the flight home on Sunday because it would have meant splitting us up on the plane even though he had to sit with his unnaturally long legs wedged into a space barely big enough for a midget's.

And that is LOVE, baby.

So I'll try to remember all of that and leave the deer heads out of it this year.

Because I have love and that is truly something.