Christmas Anniversary

On June 3, 2006, Mary joined our "Writers' Circle" at a gathering hosted by member Tom Ault, who took us on his pontoon boat for a great tour of a local lake. I'd fashioned the group after "Women Writing," where Mary and I had first met.

Today Mary and I celebrate our 11th anniversary.

Last year I did a lengthy write-up for our 10th anniversary here. This year I'll open with a few factoids:....

Among Mary's mottoes:
"Trash provides."
"Deethe breaply."

A few facts about Mary, in no particular order:

She's given gallons of blood.

She picks fallen wheel weights and discarded batteries off the street so that they don't pollute the aquifer.

She's escorted worms and other bugs off the road, out of squish range.

She's hastened to our shelves for nutrition and medical books when friends have asked for advice.

She gives awesome massages, including to folks on the street who need it.

She kills roaches with her bare hands, fearlessly.

Also fearlessly, when our cat Red was seriously ill she took his temperature with a rectal thermometer. For a month she nursed him round-the-clock, often when I was stuck in the office.

She has performed cloning.

She also once delivered 100 pizzas in a single night.

She's driven special needs children, teenagers, and adults.

She started building her first car at age 15 and finished when she was 16, using junkyard parts (they don't rust in California). It was a metallic-green Volkswagen Beetle that she named Uriah the Heap.

Not long after that, she became a Presidential Scholar.

More recently, she started carrying a leash in her fanny pack to help her guide wayward dogs home, and has used it.

She comes up with spontaneous one-liners when I least expect them and that make me howl with laughter.

She puts up with me something fierce.

And that's only the beginning.



Mary inspects the channel from the University of Tampa campus after we attended Necronomicon at the end of October 2006. Reflected at the top is the bridge we crossed.

Our celebrations are low-key. Sometimes they simply take the form of a walk. Often we call our "post office walks" mini-honeymoons. We had thunderstorms this Christmas, so we took our walk on the off-hours, leaving the house around 1:30 this morning while the rain held up. According to the Weather Channel when we got home, the temperature was 74 degrees F with a heat index of 82 and 100 percent humidity.

Something was talking in the post office pond. Mary thought it might be ducks. I thought I heard some amphibians. After some loud wind in the beginning the voices start to come through in this recording.

At around 3 AM we toasted the day with a little coffee liqueur. I'd taken my camera on the walk and got in a shot of a neighbor's lights display.



Mary will be 50 next year, so my mental cogwheels have been turning....

Mentor

You wait by the road; I walk to get the car.
We have fished for trash by the estuary,
pulled a Diehard battery from the grassy shore.
Nuke plant cooling towers steam beyond.
Behind us, tropic-colored bikinis
cavort on a manmade beach by a placid gulf.
Above us, vermilion flycatchers
flit like tiny fires amidst the palms.

The battery goes in the trunk
joining recyclables plucked from the sand.

Your sacred vision spies harm
invisible to those who are blind:
candy wrapper glint, metal stare of pop-tops,
styrofoam pieces forming a clutch of unnatural eggs.
Children notice, ask if you are a teacher,
not for the first time.
You think it is because of how you dress.

You tell them no,
but I know the answer is yes.

©2005, We'Moon '05, Gaia Rhythms for Womyn: Sacred Paths
©2005, Florida State Poets Association Anthology Twenty-Three

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.