Essay: I want a honeymoon do-over
There was nothing fancy about our wedding. There was no engagement ring: I couldn’t afford one. I told my roommates that we were making a statement about the evils of the diamond trade, and also, Stop Apartheid Now!, which made me seem noble, not impoverished. We exchanged simple silver bands from James Avery, purchased at the Sharpstown Mall, less than a hundred dollars for the pair. I wore a pink tie and a suit from J.C. Penney. She wore a white satin dress she sewed herself, a lovely ring of dried wildflowers in her hair.
It was a Texas wedding and a New York reception. We said “I do” and hopped in our truck that had no radio and drove nonstop to Buffalo, our first night together spent barreling along the Interstate Highway System, just us and the quiet and a monumental electrical storm, lighting up the Tennessee night.
We honeymooned in Stratford, Ontario, home of the world-famous Shakespeare festival. We arrived on a Sunday night and left on a Tuesday morning. Stratford’s playhouses are shuttered on Mondays. No Shakespeare for us. We booked the “Honeymoon Suite” in what the guidebooks called “a charming, typically Canadian bed and breakfast.” It cost $27 per night, Canadian, which at the time was something like $17.50 in U.S. funds.
Our hosts were indeed “typically Canadian.” They smoked Export “A” cigarettes and said “eh” a lot and wanted to talk a little hockey, even though it was June. The “suite” held an aggressively creaky double bed, bathroom down the hall, and was decorated in what you’d expect if Spencer’s Gifts opened a school of interior design: garishly colored posters of couples walking hand in hand along the beach and a plaque featuring a treacly poem entitled “What Is Love?” and a statuette of a small, goggleeyed child, standing on tiptoe and stretching his little arms wide, holding a banner reading, “I love you thiiiiiiiiiiisss much!” The “gourmet Canadian breakfast” was cheese slices and muffins from the Loblaw’s market down the street.
For 30 years, I have wanted a honeymoon do-over. It was a lovely trip, a memorable trip, but it wasn’t a particularly grand one, and she deserves grand.
There is always an obstacle. “The kids need our help with something.” “Someone is sick.” “Someone has died.” “The money isn’t there right now.” We have a shelf of guidebooks to places we planned to visit but never did: Ireland. The Amalfi Coast. Spain. The Lake District. Hungary. Rick Steves has made a small fortune on us.
“You worry about the wrong things,” she tells me. “We have a good life. Why isn’t that enough?”
It isn’t enough, I reply. Happiness requires proof these days. We Kayak and Skiplagged and Orbitz our way into some terrific deal. We jet to some distant shore and snap our legion of selfies, posting them on social media the way the Ibans of Borneo used to display the heads of their vanquished enemies on their ceremonial clothing, a symbol of our acumen and moral superiority. I’m tired of weekend trips to San Antonio and Austin being the only antu pala affixed to our ngepan. We need to go someplace exciting, someplace impressive.
She’s having none of it. She is rooted in the practical. For Valentine’s Day, I presented a coupon, “Good for a day of anything you want to do.” Give a coupon like that to a man, and you’ve locked yourself into 24 hours of fried food and indolence. Also, nudity. Men are uncomplicated beasts.
Her eyes brightened as she read the note: “I know just the thing. I want you to build me a hugelkultur.”
Hugelkultur (from the German, hugel — “this will require hours and hours of backbreaking labor” — and kultur — “because that’s the way we like things. We’re German”) is a form of raised bed gardening, in which a small trench is dug, a log — preferably a large tree trunk — is laid in the trench, leaves, branches and compostables are laid about the log, and the whole thing is covered with a load of rich soil. As the wood decays, it absorbs moisture, protecting the root system of plantings. The degrading wood and organic materials provide nutrients for the plants. The Internet is loaded with photos of fresh-scrubbed young Germans, kitted out in their tiny khaki walking shorts and Doc Martens, “Atomkraft? Nein, Danke” blazoned across their T-shirts, happily working on massive hugelkultur hillocks that make the Maginot Line look like a speed bump.
The hugelkultur project took two days, a full yard of soil, seven wheelbarrows of compost, the remains of a dead peach tree and one partially rotted log of undetermined provenance, liberated from the woods around the Schlumberger campus in Sugar Land. We ended up with two 9-foot-long mounds. It looked like we’d buried a couple of basketball players.
Within a few weeks, one of those burial mounds was covered in brilliant green vines, leaves as big as my hand nestling dozens of orange-yellow flowers. It didn’t matter that the seed package was mislabeled, and what we ended up with were baskets of decorative gourds, not the cantaloupe we’d expected. It was still beautiful. The other mound is dotted with thriving okra, and gorgeous cucumber plants are vining up the trellis she built over a portion of the mounds. It’s perfect. Her knack for finding joy, for living happily, is matchless.
She’s right about the travel, too. It’s not time, not right now. We have too much to do, too many people who need us, whom we need. The time for grand adventure will come, unless it doesn’t, and that will be fine, too. Our latest wedding anniversary was spent not in one of the grand capitals of Europe but clambering over the pink granite boulders of Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. We camped in a little clearing, near Sandy Creek. In the morning, mule deer quietly ambled through our campsite. It could not have been better.
We are acculturated to yearn for the new, the new experience, the new neighborhood, the new relationship. There is some merit in that. Newness keeps us sharp. Newness offers fresh perspectives. Newness feels exciting and energizing and filled with meaning.
What I have learned in 30 years of marriage is that when you are ready to receive it, the newness is always there. Songwriter Joe Jackson describes adulthood as a “plough through bills, receipts and credit cards, tickets and the Daily News,” and a lot of it is exactly that, with laundry and dishes added for good measure.
In 30 years, you have had every conversation, told every joke, heard every story and endured every disagreement thousands of times. It’s all been done, you think, and you decide that the only way to preserve vitality is to orchestrate a change of scenery.
Then you are out in the yard, wrestling with a recalcitrant hunk of dead peach tree, and you catch sight of her, in the sunlight. You notice the elegant curve of her neck, dissolving into those perfect collarbones, and you are 21 years old all over again, every nerve ending is buzzing with an electricity you have felt a million times but never felt before, and you cannot imagine ever drawing another breath outside her presence.
She smiles at you, and you remember that she is the first person you turn to when you need counsel, and the first person you turn to when you need comfort and the only person you trust with everything. You were madly in love 30 years ago, and love was new, but it was a shallow, half-formed thing. It wasn’t this connected. It wasn’t this whole.
Time doesn’t diminish love, it deepens it, brings it color and nuance and a strength that comes only with shared successes and shared heartbreaks. It is a good life, the life we live with the one who loves us.
We still have our bargain wedding bands. She still prefers to sew her own clothes. We still stay in weird places that pass off grocery-store muffins as “local gourmet cuisine.” We always will, I think. And I love her thiiiiiiiis much.