It’s early March. Still in bed, he opens his eyes to the wonder of winter: the familiar yet always surprising beauty of the sharp contrast between the fresh snow covered branches and the darker shade of the bark of the trees. Rays of sunlight knock at his window inviting him outside. He is filled with a sense of calm, a sense that something was rest to peace.
Anaïs got up early. She had a meeting with the organic farm coop group.
Checking on the maple trees, he collects several gallons of sap.
He feels a pinch in his heart; a desire to go on a long hike.
Anaïs’s ring comes from his cell phone.
“It’s Dad,” she says.
“Do you want me to meet you somewhere?” he says.
“It’s not pretty.” She is crying. “Even though he was mad at me for loving you, even though he was grumpy and miserable, I loved him just the same. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss him. I guess what I miss is what could have been, the love we could have shared.”
“He did not make our life easy.”
“You know what I want?”
“Wait. I’ll take you to some place you’ve never been before for a few days.”
“Would you do that?”
“I’ll ask Stan to check on the sap for us until we get back. Maybe he’ll even start boiling it.”
“The maple syrup season is my favorite you know. I hate to miss it. It always gives me a sense of newness. Remember when we first started tapping? We were like kids. It looked so much like water that we skipped stones on its surface in the vat. It made ripples and we watched the stones sink to the bottom.”
“We haven’t traveled in so long. We’ve come so used to staying home for your dad. You want to leave right after the funeral?”
“Let the dead bury the dead. Let’s leave now.”
“I did not know you read the bible!”
“I remember this from childhood. It always struck me. I did not understand it then. I see its wisdom today. I’m on my way to help pack.”
They take camping gears and warm clothes packed in waterproof bags. They get Crispin apples, crisp and not too sweet, and a batch of homemade pancake mix. They get Basmati rice and sealed packages of Indian food that can be warmed up in boiling water, leaving the pot clean. They pack bottles of water. They drive to Bear Mountain State Park to start off with a relatively easy hike to Anthony’s Nose, a 900 feet elevation, the guide says, culminating to a beautiful sight.
On the road, Anaïs catches herself examining Ray. His hair, wavy, neither long, nor short, comes down to the base of his neck. For a fifty year old man, he has very little grey in his hair, a little more in his beard. His beard, not unruly, but not over trimmed either, gives him an air of ease with himself, a man of nature. She feels her heart welling with joy. She now looks at Ray completely from her own point of view, with no conflicting thoughts of hurting her father’s expectations.
It wasn’t always smooth between them. Ray wanted children and she did not. They knew this when they were dating. He’d told her many stories of how kids keep grown ups on their toes and young. But that did not sway her. Ray did not want to give up on their budding relationship and he made his peace with it. He told her that he’d come to see that if he wasn’t going to have children of his own, he could look at every child a little bit as his. There no longer was a sense of my child versus your child in his thinking. He came to feel in a new way that it takes a village to raise a child and he was part of the global Earth village.
The first time her dad met Ray, he sternly showed her his disapproval of him. He wanted a lawyer for his son-in-law, or a doctor, someone firmly established in one of those honored professions. That took longer to shake off. She longed for a man who cared about life and did not care so much about appearances and what people thought. Yet often she wondered how he’d make their life easier financially. One day, she found herself free from this worry; she merely stopped expecting that of him. The very next day he was approached to be a wild life consultant by the State of New York and they no longer struggled for money.
She notices that she loves him more deeply after 25 years together than she ever imagined possible. It isn’t the kind of love that requires one to keep touching the other. It is a sense of respect for his ways, curiosity for the mystery of experiences to come, mixed with the inevitable joy of sharing them. It isn’t the kind of relationship that requires sex and yet when they connect that way, there is no urgency. In their union, they explore a time and space of their own – larger than their own; a universe of feelings of being alive, together, alive together. They love looking into each other’s eyes, take breaths together, and laugh at the ease of being that has come to them, with time, overcoming their differences, culminating to a deep sense of trust and playfulness.
And …
Her thoughts are interrupted by Ray glancing in her direction, for a moment not looking at the road, suspending time, noticing her staring at him, yet not breaking the shared silence, letting her welcome him in her introspective space, initiating new ripples of joy in her heart.
… and she feels his love, free, faithful, like the sap of maple trees coming back every Spring, each time offering a unique sweetness.