Thriving, driving and celebrating survival

We missed our 30-year wedding anniversary last year. We didn’t exactly “miss” it, but it became tangled up in the madness of what last year was.

We had dreamed of taking a trip to the West Coast and Airbnb-ing down Highway 1. We wanted to leisurely poke our way from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, eating food in tiny dives and haunting shoppes along the way. Needless to say, we nixed the trip because it was the right thing to do.

The sweet spot of 2020 (if you can pinpoint one amidst the sadness of loss) was learning to be still, to redefine discipline. I didn’t need to be touched by loss to have it affect me. The world was, and continues to be, swimming in loss. Dare I say if you weren’t affected, the monster of fatalism might be too big to slay. Fatalism does breed indifference if we don’t believe the world is ours to care for.

The year 2021 brings 31 years of marriage for us: a few more aching body parts, less than a year until our house is paid off and still-fierce arguments. I held my tongue when I was younger and was less sure of myself. My 40s brought awareness of who I was, and my 50s let me fling any tongue-holding into the stratosphere. I like it that way.

My husband and I are good together, disagreements and all. The ebb and flow of our chaotic love is more like an intense thunderstorm and the electric peace that creeps in afterward — the charged silence welcoming, a restful furor.

There is no right way to do marriage and partnership, and anyone who tells you there is one right way is lying. None of us are made the same, and we handle our partner’s faults and strengths each minute that is given to us. I am better at mowing the lawn. He is better at planting a tree. Together we are our greatest travel partners, maybe not agreeing on which direction to turn, but loving where we end up. At the end of every wrong turn is a new vista to explore, and after all these maddening, joyful years, I’d still choose him to see it with.

We’re loosening the reins a bit this summer, coming out of what the last year posed internally and externally for us. We’re looking forward to a wedding celebration for our daughter and to seeing our children together again, if only for a brief number of days. We’re working together to improve our land, planting new shrubbery and doing some light upgrades where we can. We’ll argue where this shrub and that one should be planted, but at the end of the day when we prop our feet up with a beer, it’s all been placed where it should be.

This fall might be it for our getaway. I have a brother-in-law who’s from Washington state who can tell us beautiful places to stop and enjoy, and a good friend who hails from Oregon. Most likely we’ll wing it and just drive, stopping for whimsy and need, hunger and curiosity.

We’re often at our very best when traveling because it’s when we throw our caution and compass to the wind, the open road beckoning us with her delights. We don’t plan where to stay or stop; we simply go. And that’s how our marriage has thrived — we simply keep going.