June finds us exploring marriage in all of its implications: the weddings of the month, but also, the marriage of two unexpected spices, ideas, colors--it's a month ripe for pairings and we'll try to explore a few here.
Because June so often resonates with the notion of weddings, I'll start with a couple of my very amateur observations about how we set ourselves up for the movie montage when love at our house anyway, is less about lighting the fire and two cats in the yard, than long evenings around our firepit after a long day of battling the litterboxes of our deep discontent or the frustration that today, once again, our partner didn't seamlessly anticipate our every need. If two cats are in the yard here at Chez Poppycakes, someone is screaming out "Did YOU let the cats out again?"
A few weeks ago, a dumpster outside the ceramics building at the art school where I work, spilled. As with most things there, it was a gorgeous mess that poured out. I pillaged before the clean-up crew arrived and found a few intact pieces:
which I brought home easily and explained to Mr. PC that we could give one or two of them away. (I mostly wanted the little candle holder with the cut-outs.) This flew just fine. But, the shards, oh the shards, the broken pretty things, they mess with our Mr. PC, who despises minutae almost as much as I am drawn to it. "For my garden..." I explained. "Stepping stones, I can show you things on pinterest..." Mr. PC bristled. "I have never liked that look," he explained, "when I was in Barcelona, I didn't even like Gaudi's work."
I began to cry. It might seem over-the-top, but Every Single Person that I know who has been to Barcelona has labeled it Poppycake's city. Color, beauty from the broken, associative thinking illustrated: it was stupid, Fair Readers, but I took the remark completely personally. And I felt very not-known by my partner.
Mr. PC, not being heartless, (if lacking certain crucial aesthetic discernments,) backed-up and said that he would be open to seeing what I came up with. I, in turn, agreed that he shouldn't have to cringe at his own yard and that I would be open to moving or changing anything that he didn't like. (The tire planters, that Mr. PC loves now, were a topic of similar consternation.) And we learned. A little snagging as we travel down the creekbed of us, but we hang in, and we keep moving. It isn't in the version of Our House as I sang it whole-heartedly back when I believed love was an assemblage of beautiful, moving moments, but there are fires lit and flowers planted and our house, for all its leaks and needed-repairs, is a very, very fine house.
That's not the all of it, but it is the sum of it. We love imperfectly, flawed, meanderingly, ridiculously and yet we love to love the next day, not to tell, not to perform our perfect households but to keep on with the keeping on.