Retired

We rattle around in the house like the dice in a gambler's hands. Separately we travel from room to room, each of us on a private quest, compelled by inner urges. He's in his usual arena, the treehouse (also called the media room), for a couple of hours, until without warning he changes floors, settles in a new spot briefly then charges down to the basement or up to his treehouse again on a mysterious, undisclosed mission whose meaning escapes me as he whizzes past, leaving me alone again with my thoughts and my armload of dirty clothes that I am lugging to the washer in the basement, thinking of much earlier laundry days (not mine, thankfully) that necessitated tubs of boiling water and feeling grateful that Maytag and its pals do the laundry for me, allowing me the freedom and the time to run back upstairs to work on the book I'm constructing by altering another book. In the meantime, he moves to the kitchen for a surreptitious handful of almonds, then we continue to meander through the house, connecting seldom after that first long morning hug but when we do connect it warms us both unless, shaken too vigorously by the gambler's hands, we strike sparks from each other which sometimes, fed by the tinder of old hurts and remembered slights, catch and blaze into an intense conflagration that can only be extinguished by time, cool wisdom, or wet tears.

All day we tumble past each other on our personal missions, breaking for lunch (I fix it, we eat it, he cleans up the debris) during which we are allowed to read, exchanging amazed words over errors, typos, or a particularly vivid or apt turn of phrase that we find in our book or newspaper or magazine.

After lunch it's back to the same routine of endless activity as we shoot from one level of the house to another, east end to west end, filling the time and the rooms with pursuits appropriate to our individual temperaments.

And if we're lucky, at the end of the day (and I really mean at the end of our day, not some metaphorical and vague cliché) we come together on the couch, my feet in his lap, and we drink a little drink (his is wine, mine is my vitamin supplement that I pretend is sherry) and then—with still fifteen minutes before the dinner in the oven will be ready—we dance. We put on "I'm All Shook Up" (Elvis, obviously) or a big-band version of "Why Don't You Do Right?" or "Cherokee." Our dance moves are limited, not by space, because we have lowered the leaf on the drop-leaf dining room table and have placed all the chairs around the perimeter, from where they watch us like so many envious wallflowers, but by our own nascent skill as dancers. We have now mastered the basic swing step, though don't ask me to talk while I'm executing it. The little extras with names like "fall-away, come-away" or "peek-a-boo", are in the process of being learned. As we dance, I am transported to my teenage self. I didn't know how to dance like this during my high school years, when everyone else was doing it, but now I do know. And my sweetie and I dance to the music with joy, with greed for more dancing and more laughter, and with the promise of love that is the very substance through which we will rattle and dance for the rest of our time together.

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com