Feeling gratitude

Crossing a small stream

 Helen took this picture of me as we were crossing a stream on our Blanchard Mountain hike last Thursday. It was a pretty hard hike for me, for some reason. Sometimes they seem fairly easy, and I've done this one dozens of times. During those pandemic years when I was only hiking with Melanie, we skipped the North Butte section, which is steep and adds a bit more elevation gain but rewards with a great view of Samish Bay. I wrote about it with pictures here, on my other blog. 

I was surprised to see this picture of myself, since it is nothing like what I think I look like. This could just as easily been a picture of a man, but it's really an elderly woman who no longer wears the trappings of femininity to accent her femaleness. What difference does it make anyway? Today, my guy and I will celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary. When we got married in freefall thirty years ago today, neither of us believed we would make it this far. Both of us were in our fifties, it just didn't seem likely that three decades later we would still be together, and doing really well in the life we have created.

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years. —Simone Signoret

We met through skydiving. I was at the beginning of my journey, with only a few hundred jumps under my belt, and he had retired (he thought) after thousands of them. He was writing about his experiences on a newsgroup about skydiving, which I had recently discovered. When I read some of his writing, I knew I wanted to meet this person, thinking he might be able to help me understand this new thrilling activity that consumed me so completely. We began an email correspondence, which continued to evolve, until one day we began calling each other on the phone. We happened to be the same age, and during the time when we learned so much about each other, we still had not met.

One day he made the decision to fly from his home in San Francisco to mine in Boulder, Colorado. We were so sure we would know the person that we passed each other as people exited the plane, not realizing we had such different ideas of who we were. But we finally connected and spent three days together, getting to know one another. It was not the romantic encounter I expected, but we did learn that we both wanted to continue our exploration of the long-distance relationship. These days, lots of people met their partners online, but we were ahead of our time. 

Eventually, he made the decision to quit his job and move to Colorado. Our early days were very rocky; he moved into the home of a friend of mine as we learned more about each other. He began to skydive again, and he joined me in freefall and taught me everything he knew, much of which I think made me a much safer skydiver. When I think back to those early days, I could not have imagined that thirty years later, we would be so completely content, and to have managed to craft such a wonderful relationship out of our bond.

On our ten-year anniversary, we jumped out of an airplane together to celebrate. And between our first ten-year anniversary and our second, we moved away from Colorado and found our new lives in retirement in the Pacific Northwest. I was still skydiving, occasionally, but he had stopped once again. By the time skydiving was all behind us, I had made over four thousand skydives, and he had around the same number, most of which were before we met.

When we moved here in 2008, I took up hiking once again, as I had been very involved in the outdoors before skydiving took me on such a tangent, and for the past sixteen years, I have continued to enjoy the beautiful countryside and made many friends through the local Senior Center. It has never been a passion of his, but on our second ten-year anniversary, we hiked to Fragrance Lake, one of my favorite places. We gazed out over Bellingham Bay from the viewpoint, and then headed back home. Today I have ordered a couple of pizzas from one of my favorite restaurants, and we will enjoy a repast together in our own kitchen.

Thirty years ago today

And we will continued to enjoy our life together for as many more years as we can. But the possibility of another ten-year anniversary is quite dubious, since we are now both well into our eighties. And my eyesight continues to deteriorate, which means that one of these days I will become legally blind. He continues to maintain his health after having had a stroke and developed a blood cancer, which is currently stable. But it's not likely that we will still be in such good shape as we are today. But who knows? More unlikely things have happened. In the meantime, I will cherish each day, each year that passes that I share with my dear partner. Life is such an adventure, isn't it?

And now I have completed this Sunday task of writing a post and sharing it with you, my dear virtual family. He still sleeps quietly next to me, and I sit here composing this post in the dark, thinking of the day ahead. My friend John will soon come to take me off to breakfast, and when I return home for the first of several heartfelt hugs with my honey, I'll be once again feeling gratitude for all my incredible good fortune. Until we meet again next week, I wish you all good things. Be well.