To Sir, With Love.

We've been celebrating Father's Day all weekend long, the Beloved Mister and I. He works six days a week: Monday through Thursday driving a truck for a food rescue agency called Nashville's Table, shortly to be operational under the greater umbrella of national agency Second Harvest. Saturdays and Sundays from noon to six pm, my Beloved is an announcer on WPLN, Nashville Public Radio; you can hear him online here: http://www.wpln.org. His voice is a sound I have, over a clutch of years, come to love as life itself; it tethers me and sounds the way home, my bridegroom's aural breadcrumbs in the thick of the forest. Elsewise, my Mister works on other projects such as putting out records on his roots indie label, Catamount, or writing for publication, such as our co-writes on Clarksdale, MS and Nashville's very own specialty, Hot Chicken, both for No Depression Magazine.

Since I have, in the last month, passed the torch from being the primary breadwinner to concentrate more fully on our soon to be expanding family and my writing, Fridays are now the day my Beloved Mister and I have to spend together, something we haven't had with any regularity in almost two years!! Fridays are now dubbed Adventure Day and may find us, as this weekend has, engaged in a favorite pastime: traveling our dearly loved blue highways in Maggie, our trusty old van, seeing what there is to see. Back when we were a long distance couple, we'd get together every few weeks and spend some portion of our time doing just this, visiting with one another and drinking in everything about the experience. My man would proclaim: This is the life: driving around with you, eating sandwiches, doing what we do.

And for awhile, we lost the ability to do that. Our coming together in the same city and working and laundering panties and purchasing postage stamps and running around fitting everything else in helped get our priorities mixed up and we forgot, somehow, to live in gratitude. The distractions and anxieties of ordinary life scattered us, and yet now, we've come through some of the early navigations and negotiations of partnership, and in this, our fourth year together, we're reaping the rich rewards of staying, even when it got really hard. Of being challenged to be our best selves from our greatest teachers: each other, and now, this boy baby of ours who we expect in late September. This baby in inside we call Ziggy and love already with a ferocity heretofore unknown.

Early Friday morning found us crumped up in our big kingsize bed reading to one another from our accumulated library of children's books. My Beloved Mister placed his head on my growing abdomen, sharing the words with our little man to be. Daily now, the babe hears his daddy read and / or talk to him. Moby Dick. Dr. Seuss. The day recounted. On this morning, my Beloved was rewarded for his attentions with a swift kick to the temple by his son. This boy of ours is active and while this gorgeous early mother mystery time seems to be going all too fast, I look so forward to meeting him out here in the world.

The presence of this babe, and all that led to his conception-- intellectually, spiritually, physically --make things seem more as they did during the time my Beloved Mister and my years long friendship became something more deeply intimate, took our collective breath away, as all at once the air was cleaner and thinking gave way to what most naturally unfolded as with a higher purpose plan. We free fell, trusting the process. For some time now, as this babe grows within me and we grow together with more mindful ministrations, Faith has again taken root; we are learning, as our friend Bill wished for us on our wedding day, in the words of writer / farmer / philosopher / conservationist Wendell Berry in his Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front to practice resurrection. To plant sequoias.

And the darkness shall bear its fruit.

Fridays, riding around with one another on backroads, eating sandwiches and loving one another so wholly and humanly is being on the most right path. As Rainer Marie Rilke told it,

Moving Forward
The deep parts of my life pour onward,

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

that I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my senses, as with birds,

I climb into the windy heaven, out

of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the sky

my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

These are days of much import, of fruition. Of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Like this morning, after opening gifts to celebrate the holiday and his impending fatherhood, my Beloved Mister spent all the time he had up until leaving for the station working on a car isue for me.... Hot, sweaty, dirt and grime on his hands and knees, my man turned to me: It's what fathers do, he said.

He learned that from his father, a good man. I suppose, in the earliest of times, I learned to expect it from my father, also a good man. I'm tired of thinking that to be a good feminist I must do everything myself. I am grateful that I have learned -- am learning -- the value of interdependence and I relish being a woman, a woman who feels ravishing and succulent in this time of growing into motherhood. I refuse to make little of it, or to deny its beauty out of fear. It is a blessing, a gift, this life I have co-created.

I am glad we're having a boy. The world needs more good men.

I live in gratitude. And for the pink light at day's end. I live for practicing resurrection, for tending the young saplings, for free falling in Faith and for celebrating these earth-bound moments like being smack dab in the middle as my man becomes a father. I live a love letter, breathing, moving, riding around eating sandwiches. To Sir, with love.

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