November 9, 2022
David and I talk about
anything and everything under the sun. We always have. We’ve never lived in
each other’s back pockets, but we’ve never been without communication between
us.
Our early married years, those
years when, as a newly married couple you try to find your footing and balance
were interesting for us, and I believe the fact that we’re still together, is because
of the work we did in those very early and iffy years.
By all common sense and the
consensus of all at the time of our marriage, we should have been doomed to
failure and destined for a divorce. We were different in a lot of ways. David
came from a family where his father would say “jump!” and everyone would ask, “how
high, sir?” I, after the age of 8 and a half, was the youngest child of three
being raised by a single mother, following the death of my father. I had no
real memory of a father as the acknowledged head of the family. My mother believed
very much that the husband’s role was exactly that, but I had no real
connection to the concept myself.
Also the fact that I was a week
shy of my 18th birthday, and
David was just 19 at the time we got married seemed to point toward the
likelihood of inevitable failure.
So right from day one, we had
very different expectations. David only ever tried to tell me what to do once,
and that was when I told him that I wanted to go to university. He didn’t want
me to, even if I could get a student grant and loan to do so. (In those days,
if one qualified, one could get mostly a grant with a small portion of loan to
pursue a university degree.) Long story short, he told me I couldn’t. I wasn’t
having that. And then we compromised. I
had left high school at the end of grade 12; he said if I could get my grade 13
(yes, we had grade 13 in 1973), and provided I could get financed through the
student grant and loan program, then I could go.
I had no problem passing that grade
and was admitted to university with childcare and living expenses included in
the grant. Truthfully, it was as if I had a part-time job for the money I
brought to the family. Sadly, I was unable to finish my B.A. because of two
consecutive challenges: my mother died just before my exams at the end of my
first year, and I became pregnant in my second year of Uni and was confined to
bedrest. As I was preparing to return to school, I discovered I was pregnant
again. With only the one child we already had, I could have managed going to
school; with three children, that wasn’t financially feasible, no matter
how much grant money I was offered.
So we worked at our jobs and
we raised our children. Life was different than I had envisioned it to be, but
not worse, not better…. just different.
As I said, David and I discuss
all manner of things. My husband is very well read—had in fact read all my
history and psychology textbooks while I was in university—and while we never
seem to run out of things to say, we don’t always agree.
One of our milestones on the
path to maturity was realizing that we did not have to agree about everything.
Also, the range of the topics
which we will discuss doesn’t appear to have any limits, and not coincidentally,
no guardrails, either.
This past Monday morning I stepped
out onto the porch to check the temperature. David was out there, with one of
our dogs on his lap. I had all the information I needed as soon as I opened the
door and beheld him in his hoodie, with the hood up. It was most definitely
brisk out. Since it was a bit breezy, I inhaled deeply and then turned to him.
“Fresh country air, today, I
see.” That is a code phrase, one that originated with my mother. It’s meaning: the
air was redolent with the aroma of…. manure.
“That time of year for it. They
have to fertilize before the snow comes.”
I nodded my agreement. “Cow
manure,” I said.
“Yes, cow manure,” he agreed.
Friends, I don’t know for certain
what it says about us both that we can tell the difference between cow, horse,
pig, and chicken manure. But we can.
For my own part, I spent the
first 18 years of my life living in what we used to call “the sticks”, which
means a rural area. There were enough farms in the vicinity that one got to
know the bouquet, shall we say, of the animals being raised. Then, after we’d
been married for a year, I came back to the country from the city, and David
got his first whiff of country life.
We lived the next fifteen
years in a rural area. Actually, we lived in the small house my mother owned (we
became her tenants), the first house she and dad ever owned, which was right next
door to the second, bigger house they bought the year before he died. When Mom
died, my sister who had lived with her, traded houses with us.
David didn’t need to have
grown up out in the country to quickly have learned the difference in odor between
the various by-products of farming. Now,
I’m not certain how quickly truly avowed city dwellers would be able to develop
this skill—except in the case of one critter. I promise if you ever have the
unfortunate opportunity to smell a chicken barn, up-close and personal, the
memory of that encounter will be forever seared into your otherwise delicate olfactory
senses.
With that image planted in
your minds, I want you all to know that yesterday, my beloved husband turned
70. He reminded me recently during one of our far-ranging chats, that he’d always
believed he would die very young. I told him to hush up, because he still could
do that.
Tonight, we go out to supper
with our daughter and our second daughter—who also had a birthday yesterday,
thus sharing the occasion with “grandpa”—and the only other guest at this outing
will be her granddaughter.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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