Yesterday would have been mine and Kateri’s 14th Wedding Anniversary… yay! Although we were together for 20ish years when she died, I was slow on the draw and waited over a decade before asking her if she wanted to get married… to me… but at least we got to call each other Husband and/or Wife for more than a few years! Of course, it’s a little weird thinking about how I’ve been a widower now almost as long as I was a Husband…! Life… sometimes it wads up your list of plans, tosses them in the trash basket, and we are forced to learn that wonderful skillset of “Adapting”.
After Kateri died, I told myself I would not work on her Death Date or on our Wedding Anniversary. Luckily, I work with some great people and so far, have been able to make that happen every year. As I’ve gotten further and further away from her Death Date, I’ve needed less and less time to recover from the emotional and psychological gymnastics routine those Anniversaries can sometimes bring. It’s also nice that as I see these Anniversaries coming up on the calendar, I’m not the emotional wreck I’ve been in the past, dreading the waves of feelings that sorta crash into you while wading through the weathering effects of Widowhood.
For the last 10 weeks Amanda and I have been doing this thing we’re calling The Sourdough Stump. Basically, Amanda has been baking more sourdough bread than we can eat and has started giving it away on Sundays… on a stump of wood… next to the dirt road. It’s something that we have both gotten really… REALLY… excited about as the weeks have gone by. We’ve met neighbors. We’ve met strangers from faraway places. We’ve waved from the porch… and have spied on peeps from the living room as they pull up next to the stump, look around as if trying to figure out what’s going on, and then wave to the house hoping someone inside see’s their gratitude. It has been such a wonderful little project for us, that even though it was my Wedding Anniversary, I still wanted to be a part of The Sourdough Stump! So I decided to spend the morning hanging on the front porch with Amanda, and then at noon I decided to go for a drive… to the camp where Kateri and I got married at.
I brought a picture with me on my little cruise across Vermont. It’s a pic of the moment we were married… arms in the air, mouths open with hoots and hollers frozen in time beneath the two perfectly placed old ass trees. I wanted go see those trees again… stand in the field… see how things have changed and what things haven’t. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen!
One of my fears on the drive over was that I would be crashing a wedding taking place there at the camp! Just driving on in like I owned the place…!.. and I didn’t want that to happen. Luckily… it didn’t. No weddings were taking place, quite the contrary… there wasn’t anyone!… couldn’t find a single person!… even tried the office and it was locked…! Now, even though I thought it would be pretty cool to revisit the place we got married and maybe get a cool pic out of it, I felt uncomfortable just parking my truck on their property and then tromping all around the fields, roads, and woods! It’s a private place, after all… and its currently foliage season here in Vermont… so I also didn’t wanna be one of THOSE people. You know, the self-absorbed-“I don’t care that this is your house, I want a picture of us and our kids in our L.L. Bean scarves and duck boots petting your cow in the field with your barn, tractor, and trees in the background” type Leaf Peepers… who will then ask you for some warm cider to take the chill off and for a cider donut just for the novelty!… (Not to be confused with the Good Leaf Peepers. You guys enjoy the show… and keep spending your money). I wanted to be respectful to this place that still holds a special spot in my heart, and to respect the people who currently hold it close to theirs… so I decided to drive home.
As I sorta said earlier, Widowhood is a great exercise in “Adapting”… “Accepting”… “Rolling with the punches”… “Going with the flow”… as we learn about ourselves, our grief, loss, and Life in a world that was never on our radar. Mine and Kateri’s Wednesday Wedding is still THE day where I feel I felt the most excitement, joy, comfort, and Love since being plopped on this earth… but that was a different Time in my Life and as the years go by, I need to recognize that there will be change in how my Past fits into my Present… and I need to adapt.
This year’s Widower Wedding Anniversary was honestly a pleasurable one. It was a nice balance between being in The Present at The Schoolhouse with Amanda, Xander, and The Sourdough Stump through the morning, while also taking the time and creating the space to provide an opportunity to stick a toe in the puddle of The Past… and not getting unexpectedly splashed by it…!
ps… It didn’t hurt that the drive was absolutely gorgeous!… we live in a beautiful place… patience helps.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
- There is a special pocket in my heart for the people who were at our wedding, who were there to celebrate Us, who gave me wonderful stories and memories to take with me on this journey that I can share with people who cross my path… and I miss them all.
- Since the beginning of my Widowhood, I have sort of isolated myself from friends, family… the world. I can sometimes justify it in my head with the ol’, “There was a global pandemic” and “Going through my mom dying” or “The struggle just to keep my life, my house, my job somewhat in order” blah blah blah type things, but for whatever reason, what it comes down to is…… I don’t take/make the time to communicate with people… and it’s been a hard thing to come to terms with.
- I have learned that the best way to get THE PERFECT Frosted Flakes-to-Milk ratio is to eat them late at night from a sentimental coffee mug while leaning against the counter in a dimly lit kitchen… with a fork.
I’m just gonna preface this with my Wedding Anniversary was actually yesterday, I’ve been horrible at planning things lately, and at 10:08 in the morning… I’m still in the same comfy clothes as last night because I fell asleep on the couch! (I like to think of it as me being efficient… this way I don’t have to get undressed just to put them back on for a Sunday morning!) Long story short… well, abbreviated… this is what I did.
It was a beautiful drive… cloudy… cool. I took the dirt roads for the first bit and just got in the right frame of mind. When I hit Montpelier I thought, “I should probably eat breakfast…?!” and then Penny Cluse in Burlington instantly came to mind… because I love it there. As I got a little further down the road, another thought popped into my head that put a smile on my face… we cooked a majority of the food for our wedding in the Penny Cluse kitchen!… how fitting that I would be eating there!… today! It’s that whole attachment to experiences thing that I seem to keep trying to do, but it worked for this! So I got to Burlington, ate my Mama Cruz’s Huevos Rancheros, caught up with a couple of people, gave and got a hug from Charles, and moved on to the next phase of the journey.
Well, yesterday was a Saturday… and even though we got married on a Wednesday, most people get married on Saturdays… so the thought was, “I wonder if there is gonna be a wedding going on when I pull up?!”… there was. At least, that’s what I’m assuming… because there were people milling about as if they were getting ready for a wedding!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 