At Random for Feb. 10, 2012
Love thrives through gestures, too
Walk into any corner drugstore this week, and you’ll find the aisles abloom with red — the bright crimson of heart-shaped candy boxes and over-sized greeting cards for Valentine’s Day.
I welcome the bright scarlet of this lover’s holiday and the relief it brings to the pipe-gray doldrums of late winter.
But after 18 years of marriage, the image I get when I think of love isn’t a bright cardboard heart, but a pair of beige chairs, tucked in opposite corners, waiting for the husband and wife who fill them each morning as they start another day, for better or worse.
The chairs belonged to my grandparents, and then my mother, who passed them to us not long before she died.
If my marriage had a coat of arms, then these two matching chairs — slightly stained, a little worn, but welcoming nonetheless — would be depicted on the family shield, along with an end table and two coffee cups for good measure.
As we share coffee each morning, my wife sits in the chair that faces outward, toward the driveway and the waiting world, while I sit across from her, looking into the yard, the bird feeders, the squirrels along the fence.
That’s how the marriage has gone all these years — I, the introvert, gazing inward, she, the extrovert, nudging me into experiences beyond myself, such as parenthood and travel, that I otherwise would have missed.
We’re different in other ways, large and small. She likes her coffee less sweet than mine, more lightened with cream, and we sort the servings by placing hers on the left, mine on the right.
When we were dating, my wife sometimes gave my visits a sense of occasion by sprinkling the coffee grounds with cinnamon before brewing the pot.
Two decades later — sometimes, if I am out of sorts, and sometimes, for no reason at all — I’ll take my first sip of morning coffee and taste cinnamon on my tongue. It’s a reminder, as I scan the morning headlines and catch up on the latest wars and the most recent murders, that I am sitting in a warm chair next to someone who loves me.
Valentine’s Day celebrates love’s bold declarations, the grand gestures of poetry and chocolate, cards and candles.
Romance needs those things to brighten its path, but its journey is sustained, I have found, by the lowercase rituals that stitch two people together day by day, year by year, without fanfare or fuss.
The shared umbrella in a grocery lot.
The joined hands while watching a sitcom.
Two cups of coffee passed between armchairs.
As luck has it, my wife will be out of town on Valentine’s Day.
But as a hopeless creature of habit, I’ll end up pouring two cups of coffee on that special day — one for myself, another for my absent spouse.
That’s the other strange, wonderful thing I’ve learned about being in love for 18 years.
The one you love is always there, even when she isn’t.