I accept love. Not its infinity, but its front porch. --Taije Silverman
''But I am very wild at heart sometimes,'' Robert Frost once wrote to Louis Untermeyer. ''Not at all confused. Just wild - wild.''
David Lynch's own Sailor Ripley and Lulu, their wild love and wild dialogue: "If you are truely wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams . . . Don't turn away from love, Sailor . . . Don't turn away from love . . . Don't turn away from love."
* * *
Yesterday morning I woke early and decided to whip up some turkey bacon, eggs and drop one of the crumpets in the toaster that Mr. Poppycakes bought at the market on our Friday night trip there. We were scheduled to meet a couple for a date night and someone got the date wrong and we were thirty miles from home and a whole twenty-four hours early. Worse, we were at a mall on a Friday night. It is open-airy and pleasant but The Place to be, dine and the like on a weekend night. Mr. Poppycakes likes to be in the home and quiet and book kind of setting. But we spied a Trader Joe's and went in all gussied-up as we were and strolled the aisles. Mr. Poppycakes and I differ in the flavor adventure front. I believe this to be a theme here. But lately, two and a half years in, we're trying to give a little more in the direction of the other. We are both happier for it, I think, too.
Mr. Poppycakes loves pumpkin butter and Trader Joe's has pumpkin butter. As we headed to the appropriate aisle, he pointed out the mango butter, knowing how I love mangos. He insisted we buy it. "I need to try new things and it will make you happy." A small thing, but in our history of the serious stubborns, it touched me.
This is the green of new mint. This gold
is the dark gold of nightlights. *
Flash forward to Saturday morning and I am attempting get the mango spread uniformly into every crater on that crumpet's surface and I am realizing, while we're no O'Henry story--sacrificing our watches and long locks for each other's watch fobs and combs, that this is love. A daily appreciation and sharing. I say this still, with awe, because I have always loved the notion of the wild-hearted. The fiery romance that is both impossible and well, impossible. It has never been that way here. Mr. Poppycakes is a man of infinite directness and when he declared his intentions, well, they became a house, a life together with sunrises over the water not far from our window sometimes blazing red or pink, sometimes a kind of copper, not dissimilar to yes, that mango butter.
Sunday night now and my new niece, Miranda, is four days beyond her due date. We are leaving soon to meet her and to take a few days to bask in some Florida sun, the sea air, but most of all to see my little man, Evan and to meet Miss Miree. I talk to her in my head, I think of her and her brother, who is only two and a half himself and what I might like for them to learn early and it is this: the trust to a kind of love that allows each person to be generous knowing that the other will look out for her and her interests at least as much as his own. I have been stupidly-lucky to have this in more than one partner and to have a wealth of it from my friends. I wish for my niece, my nephew that.
This was one of my favorite kinds of weekends. Housepainting to good music, a big fat vegetable casserole that we could smell wafting through the kitchen and today, lots of laying around, watching movies, reveling in the warmth of the bed, our life. It is the calmest thing. Yet, daily, I am breathtaken, daily, I look around and think how did I get here? This is wild, wild.
The quiet and corseted, the long white dress dusting the floor as she moved over it. Emily Dickinson knew what it meant to be all wild inside with a silence casting along her face like lantern light.
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
* also from Taije Silverman