Susan Noyes Anderson has written our UP CLOSE: MARRIAGE MAKING IT WORK post today. Sue describes herself as a grandma who loves to write and a writer who loves to grandma. She hails from Northern California and is the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of three (who still have a lot of growing to do). If you haven’t seen her blog at Sue’s News, Views ‘n Muse, be sure to visit. She also has fun maintaining a poetry web site with nearly 200 of her poems on it. Sue is the author of three books and has published articles, poems, and stories in various magazines, anthologies, and online publications.
I met my husband when we were both freshmen at the University of Utah. He was only eighteen years old at the time, and I was even younger–sixteen. We fell for each other pretty hard, but it was four years until we got married. (His idea. He wanted us to graduate first.)
For the first ten years of our marriage, I never even noticed he wasn’t perfect. The next ten years were spent resigning myself to the fact that he wasn’t perfect. The following ten taught me to accept the fact that he wasn’t perfect. And today (eight years into the next ten), I appreciate the fact that he isn’t perfect.
So. We’ve come full circle. Except that this time the “not noticing he isn’t perfect” comes with knowledge and appreciation. I see his imperfections, and I like them. They are familiar, endearing, and they balance out my own. I need that. Working in unison, we bring one another from either extreme toward the center, and both of us come closer to getting it right.
As people, we are still imperfect as can be, but our choice to be together (forever) is not. And that IS perfect.
Not long ago, I ran across a photo of two trees, a photo that reached all the way into my heart and pulled hard. These graceful giants seemed almost to share one trunk, but their upward growth flowed in and out, at times intertwined and at times separate, weaving away then toward each other in a beautiful dance of branch and limb. As always when I am particularly moved, I wrote a poem. One of the first things I did was share it with my husband, because it’s about us.
I’ve always been drawn to visual representations of the tree of life, and I’m delighted to have found what is, for me, a visual representation of the tree of marriage––or my marriage, at least. Acted upon by sun and storm, worn by wind and water, our trunks have stretched and dipped, met and parted. Winding over, under, around, and through each other in ways both sacred and superficial, our boughs have formed shapes and spaces known and understood by only the two of us. From newlywed bliss to the financial woes of a growing family, amidst baby blessings and adolescent acting out, through times of privation and times of plenty, we have stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Birth, death, disease, disaster, accomplishment, disillusionment, pain, jubilation, fear–all have left their mark. Life has joined us at the root and made us stronger.
As a young man about to marry the girl whose dreams were straight from a storybook, my husband inscribed the inside of a plain, gold wedding band: “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be.” It may have taken us forty years to figure out what that really means, but he was right. And we are living it.
union: the nature
©2010 Susan Noyes Anderson
our roots run
together
trunk to trunk
we rise up
bark on bark
we grow
leave knots
love knots
forget-me-knots
knotholes and
arching separations
always winding back
together
bowing
to and fro
as branch in
branch we dance
and struggle
hang low then
stretch high
boughs yearning
reaching turning
tasting bits of
one (the very same)
bright azure sky
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