June Brides
I once wrote a college paper entitled “Brides of Burden.” It was about marriages in the peasant class during the High Middle Ages in Germany. After I researched and then complied the paper, I was taken with the idea of burden and marriage in that era among that specific social class.
I don’t intend to suggest that marriage is a burden but while I was pondering this month’s prompt and what comes to mind about the month of June, the topic of June Brides came to me, hence this present meandering on the topic. 
Bear with me. There is a connection between my college paper, and this month’s prompt.
As a college professor, I have to be adaptable yet firm on many of my assignments, and definitely my expectations of students’ abilities and outcomes. Often, they change their minds mid-way through a project and my response usually is, “You’re not married to your original thesis, you have the freedom to change your mind.”
Back to the burdened brides, and this month’s prompt:
- What are we “married to? What things will we not forsake, alter, or redefine?
- Why do we hold on to these ideas, people, items, or dreams etc?
- Is being “married” to these things a burden? Why? What makes them burdensome? How can we release them?
- Or maybe it is the opposite. Is being married to these things a joy? What makes them liberating or joyful?
- How does being married to these thing or things define us, enhance or detract us from who we really are?
**
Consider the word “marriage.”
My father taught me to cook sitting on the kitchen counter beside him at the stove. He would coddle and woo his concoctions telling me to smell and taste and stir the ingredients to know if the dish was ready. “To hell with the recipe,” he would say, “Cooking is a marriage of heart, soul, and ingredients. It’s a life-time of love.”
Where is the marriage in your life? Where is the perfect blend of heart and soul and love? Think not only of a physical marriage between spouses, but a marriage of ideas that you share with a special person, or a specific cause or passion. With whom or what do you share a bond that is beyond our conventional meaning of marriage? How did that bond form?
I hope this idea inspires some interest in your writing muses or at least tickles the keyboard a bit for you.
Fondly,
Janice
Love in a Cereal Box
My husband and I of fourteen years are polar opposites.
For a brief moment in our marriage, I actually believed all the platitudes my long-married friends offered about opposites. I know it’s all about balance and harmony and complimenting the other’s lack, but after living with such drastic differences for every minute of every day of married life, I realize that it’s not so cute; it’s mostly vexing, and a frequent aggravation we would both rather be without.
But there it is. I’m up he’s down. He’s a thinker, I’m a doer. I’m proactive, he reacts. He’s a homebody, I’m the gypsy. He’s the realist, I’m the dreamer. I’m sushi and mineral water; he’s red meat and potatoes. I’m the talker, he’s the listener. He’s asleep just about the time my second wind kicks in. He’s the scientist, I’m the artist… And while we navigate our way through the differences, the one thing we do agree on is that we were meant to be together and we wouldn’t be with anyone else.
One of the small pleasures I derive from my husband going to bed earlier than the harshest curfew should allow is letting him know that I think about him long after he’s off in dream-land. I think about him all the time, during the day, while I drive to and from work, when I am out getting groceries, or picking up the dry cleaning, while I walk the dogs; feed the cats. And he knows every morning when he pours his cereal out of the box.
Somehow, my sleeping subconscious senses his 4 a.m. stirrings in the quiet house. The pets are asleep; traffic has hushed; the odd train rumbles by. Somehow, this punctuated silence signals me that my predictable, early-rising, never-miss-a-day-of-work husband is starting his daily routine. Moments later, I hear the shower snap off; I sense him wandering through his socks and underwear, and I follow his movements to the closet while he picks out his clothes. I feel him slip back into the bathroom, light muted by the closed door. In my half-sleep I smell his cologne as his fingers tap a quick rhythm against his freshly-shaven skin. In my sleepy half-slumber, I think how sexy he smells, and I can’t wait for his kiss goodbye.
I hear him shuffle toward the kitchen, the soles of his polished shoes making a soft clicking sound across the tiled floor. Like a kid at her birthday party awaiting the cake shimmering with candles, I wait for the sound of wood scraping against floor as my husband pulls his chair out from under the table. And, like a kid holding her breath for the Christmas-tree lights to turn on for the first time of the season, I wait for the sound of his cereal flakes clinking into the bowl, telling me he read the note that I left for him the night before. Just like every night since I realized in this marriage of opposites, that his yin truly complimented my yang, and that his earth was my sky, I leave love notes for him taped to his cereal box.
I inhale a slow, a sleepy breath, and I snuggle deeper into the pillow where his head just lay, and I drift off, knowing he knows that I love him. And I know that this morning, like every morning before that, he will come back to my side of the bed, and on his way out the door, he’ll nuzzle his cleanly-shaven, smooth and sexy-smelling neck to mine, and tell me that I am his one and only. He’ll kiss me goodbye as he heads off to work in the dark morning.
And his kiss tells me there is nothing opposite in the way we feel about each other.
**
**Paul and I have now been married for 30 years. I will say that marriage is the hardest job I have ever had, and I wouldn’t do it again. Either would he, Paul says. Who has thirty years left to create a balance, find the swing, enjoy the equilibrium, bask in the silence that says we are comfortable with each other? It takes a long, long time to know that the squeeze of a hand is the same as a bear hug, the giggle we share over a corny TV show is the uproarious laughter we used to bellow out and a quiet night of snuggling can be as romantic as the honeymoon was.
Has it been perfect? Not at all.
Fun? Sometimes.
Vexing? More than I like to admit.
Worth it? You bet.