Fifty years ago this week, quite by accident, I met the woman who would become my wife. We were thrown together on a ride from the San Francisco airport to Stanford University, where I was a student. She was visiting on her spring break from the University of Nebraska, half a continent away. At the time, I thought it was pure chance that brought us together. I’ve come to believe quite differently about that in the decades since.
Across our fifty years together, we’ve cast substantial shadows, sometimes separately but more often together. We visit Sedona, Arizona, every March for some much-needed refreshment of our souls, and every year I take a photograph of our long, linked shadows. It reminds me that although there is great beauty in all that the light around us illuminates, there are lovely unexplored places deep within us still waiting in the shadows to be discovered and enjoyed.
Love this post. Shadows on the Lawn in Charlottesville when I proposed, shadows on the red rocks of Sedona 25 years later with a vortex energy blessing and shooting stars at night
And sorry I could not travel both,
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could…
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
My husband and I just celebrated our 43rd anniversary on April 1. It’s a strange wedding date, but I guess the magic of that day is still working!
Congratulations on anniversary #50! That’s a wonderful achievement!
Best wishes!
Muriel
Anonymous from above needs to cite his source for the sections of verse he has taken word for word from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.
Thanks for the post and congratulations on your 50th anniversary of meeting. It’s interesting to read about that certain fate or synchrony which lent a hand in bringing you two into one car ride, suddenly no longer worlds apart.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the one event that led to a new acquaintance with the man who would become my husband.
The chance (or not simply “chance”) encounter was being placed on a finance committee for a nonprofit. A two-year commitment to spend one half day a month with the other 4 people on the committee.
I was placed on that committee by a friend who recently passed away. I never would have met my husband but for that one moment that changed everything and yet it took a series of moments– it was 14 months into the commitment before I realized I had fallen in love. It takes what it takes.
Thank you for giving me something to ponder with the visual analogy of the lengthy shadows. We’re nowhere near 50 (closer to ten years) so there’s a lot of reassurance in your words that at 50 years, there is still a sense of more to discover.
Your story about how you and your wife met by chance is one I totally believe was predestined – as was my own story:
Over three decades ago when my ex-husband would once again terrorize me and our two young children, I’d escape with them in tow, and drive away to a little town some 20 minutes away to find solace and safety. We always chose a spot on the drive up on a hill at that town’s high school entrance, where we could marvel at the treetop view below us and somehow pretend as if all was well in the world again. My two children and I would laugh, sing and dance around our parked car, and at times wave up to a smiling man who we would see perched inside the school next to an open window, eating his sandwich.
We’d fantasize about me someday returning to teaching once again and maybe even teaching at that school.
That fantasy became a reality a few years later after my divorce…and that smiling man (the well-loved school custodian) and I will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this June 23!!!
(He has loved reading every single one of your books!)