Peeking Into My Life

It was early evening and cooling off.  The last couple of times I tried to walk in the woods, the bugs were so bad I didn’t get far.  Even the dogs were trying to outrun the horseflies.

With the sun low in the sky, I figured there would be fewer bugs if we kept to the dirt road just south of the farm.

At first, I walked past the field, the dogs running ahead of me.  For all the years we’ve lived here it’s been planted with corn, but this year it had a low cover crop.  And it had just been mowed.

I called the dogs back and we headed into the field.

The last time I walked in this field there was enough snow on the ground for me to be wearing snowshoes. The dried, cut corn stalks, most of them sticking straight up through the snow, would get caught in the mesh of my snow shoes making it hard to walk.

I’d never been in this field in the summer. It was barely recognizable to me.

The two old Shag Bark Hickorys sprouted 8-inch deep green oblong leaves.  The stone wall was hidden by tall grasses and wildflowers.

Fate and Zinnia ran under the old strand of barbed wire that leads into The Orphaned Woods, but quickly came back when I called to them.  We were separated from our farmhouse by the marsh and I saw it as never before too.

Shrouded in trees, with the hill rising behind it,  it was as if I were peeking into my own life from the outside.

Yesterday Jon wrote on his blog about a “bump” we had in our relationship.  It happened because,as prices began to rise and his blog donations began to dwindle, Jon had used up most of his IRA to keep up with our expenses over the past months.  But he didn’t tell me.

For me, it was more about trust than money.  Jon had his reasons for not telling me, some of it fear and shame.  He was also trying to protect me because I was going through a difficult time dealing with emotional issues around my birth family.

We were able to get to a better place by talking honestly to each other.  Not always easy, but simple. And we’re still doing that.

Yesterday Jon had a moment of clarity about some of his impulses around money that rocked our world again.  This time in a good way.  And he helped me emerge from a panic attack over money just by us being able to talk openly about it.

But these kinds of changes, individually and as a couple, don’t just happen because we want them to.  We’re changing lifelong habits and ways of thinking.  So we still have a lot of ongoing work ahead of us.

But neither of us is afraid of that.  We welcome it because we both know that what we already have can be even better.

Jon wrote how we’re both anxious people but that doesn’t mean we aren’t strong.  That’s what we need to remember about each other.  Underneath the anxiety is two strong, creative, and determined people.

And we wouldn’t want to be thought of in any other way.

Walking in the field and seeing our farmhouse as I’ve never seen it before makes me think of Dorothy and her red shoes. All this stuff that Jon and I are dealing with has been right in front of us all along. The trouble as well as the solutions.

We just couldn’t see it.

As the field circled back to the road we walked along the same stream that runs under the Gulley bridge.  I couldn’t see the water because it was hidden by wildflowers.

But I could hear the bullfrogs and see the stands of cattails, so I knew it was there.