Whelp- see this is why I don’t ever give teasers. here I THOUGHT I’d write both days last weekend and ended up not, as I took the time to detail clean my dad’s house/cabin while he was out of town visiting my brother. Evenings, mornings, and seven hours total later I had it sparkling… and got thanked for “straightening up a bit.”

I’ll have plenty of time to blog moving forward, from all that time I’ll save from never doing that again!

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So like… there has been so very much to write about lately, but I haven’t written about our anniversary and I’ve wanted to. So while the garden is humming along and the house (and Dad’s house) are clean, I might finally get that chance. Hope I can do it justice.

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And so… Our Anniversary

God we’d had such a wonderful wedding back in 2004.

My husband and I celebrated all the romance things, we enjoyed every and all opportunities for it- anniversaries included. This would be the first anniversary without him and I was apprehensive but knew I wanted to do something big enough to do it justice. I had finally resolved to go up to Pace Bend Park in Austin, where we’d met, where we’d spent so much time, and where he’d proposed. We hadn’t been there in about 13 years though, so I was wondering about how long it would take me to get to the right spot, and the effort that might involve- but I knew I would know it when I saw it. I never worried about not being able to find it.

I had wanted to do this for a while and had almost gone in the fall but had backed out at the last minute. It would have been too devastating to go and not find him there, so I had put it off.

I knew this was the right time though.

On the morning of the 17th I got the girls off to school and coordinated for a friend of mine to pick up my youngest in case I wasn’t back from hiking at the lake in time. I packed up a rose out of the one’s I’d bought myself the day before, loaded my husband’s hiking backpack with breakfast, a blanket to sit on, water, and rocks I’d painted to bury at the campsite.

Orange roses- in Victorian flower language they mean fascination. It’s why I had them in my wedding flowers, though mine were more peach in color than these almost neon ones. I know red means love, and pink roses are my favorite, but I picked orange for our wedding roses because he always fascinated me.

I was doing a cool black outline for a shadow effect on the writing and then fucked it up on the N in my name… so then I had to outline everything fully and it turned the writing more Seusian than I’d like… but I wasn’t going to redo it.

I made the rock that color pink because my husband (when we first started dating) always carried a pink lighter that exact color. I asked him about it once and he said it was because no one ever stole pink lighters.

Now look. He’s said and done many cooler things before and after, but I remembered the exact next thought I’d had after he said that about the lighter. I thought: “This is the coolest motherfucker I’ve ever met.” And I was exactly right.

Anyway. I made it pink for that reason. Even though his favorite color was blue and mine is green.

I took his CD of songs, and listened to him singing the whole hour and 45 minute drive there. I talked to him a bit, told him what I was doing and that it was my anniversary gift to him, and told him if he wanted to get me anything he could send me a rainbow. Not sure why I said it- there was no rain or much humidity. A passing thought, said out loud, is all.

I got to the park and looked at the map. I had not been there in over a decade and I’d never been the one driving when we’d gone… but that’s the good thing about being next to a body of water… I knew what side the cliffs were on, so that was enough to orient me. I parked at the first available spot, loaded up the backpack, and then started hiking.

I saw the cliff outcrop where we’d watched the University of Texas diving team once. Gosh it had been amazing to see. I knew the angle we’d witnessed that from, so knew roughly where the spot must be that we had been at- so I kept walking.

The cliffs were SO high. The lake was so low. The diving team couldn’t have done that now, the outcrop was twice as high and had a bunch of exposed boulders at the base. The campsites no longer had any access to the water.

The whole place felt basically abandoned and unusable. Aside from 2 bikers I passed on the way in there was no one else in this whole side of the park. And sure, it was a Thursday morning right as the park opened… but there was no trash. It didn’t look much used these days. Not like it had been when we’d been young and the water was higher and Lucas was alive.

Things had been different then.

It was a beautiful hike, all like this, along the rock outcrops along the cliff face.

I found our spot after I’d walked for quite a long time, and knew it immediately. I knelt on the edge of the cliff. Took the rose out of my backpack and threw it in the water. I started talking and the wind picked up and my vision blurred from tears and the sun shimmered on the water and they went brighter and brighter and blurrier and blurrier…

And then I came to. It was weird. I’d gone somewhere else there for a bit, when all my eyes were seeing was the shimmers on the water. I couldn’t exactly remember what I’d all said but knew I’d kept talking the whole time. I don’t know how to describe it.

I was there.

Everything went white.

I was there again.

That’s the closest I can get to describing it. Did I hypnotize myself by looking at sun sparkles through tears? Hell if I know.

It was really peaceful and the wind was already starting to dry my tears and then a hawk wheeled overhead for a while and I watched it till it was gone. I stood up and brushed off my knees and then walked back from the cliffs towards the campsite.

I unrolled the blanket and then ate my donut and an orange and had some water and I set out the concha I had brought for Lucas. After I’d eaten I took the concha and tossed it into the water. It took SO long to hit the surface. This was the spot you could swim up to and get in and out of, in the before time. Now the water was dangerously far down and unreachable.

I went back and got out the rocks I’d painted. I tucked 2 smaller ones with our initials way up under cliff overhangs right along the edge and pushed them out of reach with a stick (I was safe while I was doing this, swear to god, there was a shelf underneath where I’d done this) and then I took out my trowel and buried the pink rock I’d made at the campsite itself. I added two pennies, JUST in case he actually needed them in the afterlife. Better safe than sorry.

And then I went and sat on the blanket I’d spread out, right where we had always set up our tent. Right in the spot I’d been sitting, when I first met him on that big ol’ camping trip with my brother and his waiter friends and those waiter friends’ friends back in 1999. This was the spot that changed my life.

I took a picture of it- it seemed so innocuous, you know?

I sat down and just listened to the breeze in the trees and the birds and the quiet. I didn’t have to work too hard to clear my mind. I was in a bit of a weird headspace after the whole cliff whiteout thing earlier. Peaceful. Not sorrowful exactly but aware deeply of my loss in the here and now. Just very, very present, is the best way to describe it, and not bothered by thoughts.

I sat there for a time and then I laid back and did a guided meditation I like that I had recorded on my phone.

This was the view I was looking at, up through the branches.

And then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

How the hell did I just… go to sleep? I’m not much of a public sleeper, though I guess I can do it on planes if I have a window seat to tuck into. I wasn’t even really tired. But oh to drift off under the branches of a tree you know with the breeze on you and the birds singing… it was all so peaceful.

Perhaps a snake slithered by while I was asleep. Or an ROUS could have bumbled by like in the Princess Bride when Wesley and Buttercup are in the lightning sand. Most likely there was nothing.

All I know is I felt safe enough to sleep and so I did.

It was deep and dreamless. Reminds me a bit of the feel of the last line from The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boyton. “They rock, and rock, and rock to sleep.”

It was like that.

I woke up. I got up and scattered 4 packets of prairie coreopsis seeds about on the verges of the campsite and trails. That was Lucas’s favorite wildflower. They’re native there, so i’m not screwing the ecosystem or anything. And sure. it’s the wrong time of year for it but some of them have to take, I expect.

I pack up, am annoyed how hard brushing the leaves off that blanket turns out to be, and then head back walking south along the cliff face to my car. it’s a good 30 minute walk or more.

When I told this story to my therapist later I tell her it really felt like he was out there. And she says “Of course he was there. How else would you have felt safe enough to sleep?” This feels like the correct interpretation.

On the drive back I feel good but absolutely wrung out. The sun is shining. Its barely 2pm at this point (clocks and time are starting to make sense again by that point). I’m almost home and then I see this:

it isn’t on my windshield.

It is the strangest rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life- not a perfect arch, just from one cloud to the next and so much brighter than that hasty picture while driving could really capture. I call my friend and our oldest and ask them to go outside and if they see it too… both can. I am reassured by this that I’m not having a stroke or cracking up.

That handsome bastard has out-gifted me every single year to date… not sure why I thought today would be any different.

It was, after all, what I had asked him for.

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That evening I had planned to cook dinner and watch a movie with the girls… but I was DONE for the day.

I bundle them off to spend the night with my oldest with my apologies but told them all that I just needed the house to myself. (they had off on Friday, so there was no school concern). I think they were not the biggest fan of that but they didn’t fight me on it. But that day… that day I just needed to be on my own. To be just a person, processing.

I wasn’t hungry but ordered myself a green smoothie and kale salad on Uber Eats. Afterwards I sit outside as the sun goes down and drink two beers out of a handblown green glass I’d bought for this exact purpose. I realize it was made in 2024 as the artist had signed and dated it. I don’t exactly love that, as it had been the worst fucking year of my life… but I still like the glass and decide not to hold it against it.

I take a blazingly hot bath. I doom scroll on my phone a bit.

I go to sleep.

I have no dreams.

I wake up still well and truly wrung out and it takes me that day and most of the next to recover.

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And I don’t know what all to make of it or if I even have to. Sometimes beautiful things can be beautiful without assigning an exact taxonomy to them.

In the days and weeks since I have thought on and off about all the places we leave little pieces of our souls over the course of a lifetime. I know that spot over the lake had pieces of both of ours- no question about it- I could feel it. I wonder on and off where the rest of them are, and I mark a couple I’m pretty sure of.

I wonder how long they last.

I wonder a great many things.

But one thing I don’t wonder about is love. No, with love I KNOW, deeply and with no question to it, that love is never gone. Not when it’s like ours it isn’t.

This feeling and thought stays with me every day afterwards and alleviates so much of the anxiety and dread I had had about the calendar turning to May again.

And for this, and many things, I’m thankful.