I walk through a new neighborhood from time to time these days.
I have gotten married in recent weeks.
The blending of households will take place gradually over the coming months. Until then I spend one night a week in what will become my new neighborhood.
Without being impulsive, the November decision to marry was nothing I would have been ready for a few months earlier. The ceremony in mid-January was simplicity itself – the guests few, the officiant someone of our choice. Neither decision nor ceremony was out of character – not for me, not for the man who has become my husband.
Several months’ steady exchange of emails and text messages had preceded the November decision. Lots of writing. Lots of probing. Lots of careful reading. Lots of creative ways to say more and more. Increasingly there was only one audience that mattered, only one writer whose words mattered quite so much.
I did not know with any assurance what else to take time to write. I did not yet know what there might be to say about how my days were getting to feel, what my nights were becoming.
The new neighborhood was something I got to glimpse regularly through a bedroom window at two o’clock on a Saturday morning. The routes that my car followed to the parking spot in front of a hundred-year-old house became Friday routine. I learned the smoothness of the banister as I came down for weekend breakfast.
This landscape will not be rushed. These joys are new. They come as they do.
