At the Epicenter of My Life: A Summer Day in Essex

      “Enjoy the little things, for one day you will look back and realize they were the big things”  (Robert Brault).

I look back with love and longing over the thousands of pages in my book of married life – days, years, decades of treasure. Yet, the days upon days of routine become indistinguishable one from the other, punctuated from time to time by milestone events published in family photo albums.

Sometimes, the passage of those years compresses into an unreadable language. I try hard to retrieve mental images of undocumented daily routine that tell the story of the forty-one years of my marriage to Paul, hoping that memories of conversations, scenes, stories, are not lost for good.

I easily recall the major events – bringing our newborns home from the hospital, buying and renovating the derelict carriage house in Manchester, then the Bauhaus-style house of our dreams in Essex, watching in horror as the historic lodge building at Camp Menorah across Lake Chebacco burned to the ground, opening Bravissimo Hairdresser in Beverly Farms, hosting the 50th anniversary celebration for my in-laws, plowing out from under the Blizzard of ‘77.

But what happened in the course of a typical day, starting with French toast in the morning and ending with a bedtime story for the kids, the Johnny Carson Show for us?

It’s a summer day in 2017 as I write this, not quite four years after the death of my husband. I choose another mid-summer day to reclaim from memory, this one at our family homestead in Essex where we brought up our four children from 1978 to 2002. I put myself there, for just one day, in just one scene, at the chronological epicenter of my life.

I am thirty-six years old, Paul is forty-five. Our youngest son Max is five, with a cheerful smile and sparkle in his eyes. It’s 1981. My mind’s eye scans a three acre expanse of flat, grassy field. Looking out from the front door, I rest my eyes on two rows of gnarled apple trees in the distance, greened up after spring rains loosened their pale pink blossoms.

I squint through the bright sun, looking for my husband. He sits on his Yanmar tractor, a baseball cap shading his face. The mowing deck is six feet across, yet even so, he takes most of the afternoon to complete the task. If there is a rainstorm mid-week, he’ll mow again—he tells me that if he neglects it, the field will fill up with clumpy little grass hills. This offends his esthetic sense, precision hair cutter that he is. When my mom refers to his lawn mowing as “giving the grass a haircut,” he smiles at her apt analogy.

Paul grew up on the mean streets of Dorchester-Mattapan in the 1940s, working as a mechanic in his father’s Esso station near Franklin Field. When we bought the house in Essex, he discovered his passion for agriculture and signed up for animal husbandry and fruit tree cultivation courses at the Aggie.

For a couple of years, he raised Oxfordshire sheep, a large, Buddha-like breed with distinctive black outlines embedded in the wool on their faces. He built a lean-to shed and installed an electric fence around one acre of lawn. He let the flock graze within the fence – rows of slow-moving, prehistoric lawn mowers, silently gnawing the grass down to the ground.

He immersed himself in the creation of a pattern beginning on one side of the property, u-turning to cut an adjacent swath, until he covered the entire three acres in six foot wide swaths. If feeling inspired, he composed a Fenway Park plaid.

When a phone call came in or lunch was on the table, I waved energetically from the front door, hoping he would pick up his head and notice my flailing arms – this never worked. Yelling at the top of my lungs was not an option. My voice did not carry across the field through the distant grinding of the engine, the familiar background sound of a hot July afternoon.

Eventually, I dropped what I was doing in the house and walked the several hundred feet to the middle of the field. When Paul spotted me directly in his path, he cut the engine just in time.  Sometimes, I ventured out under the cloudless sky to bring him a large glass of ice-cold lemonade.

Our rituals—the mowing in beautiful patterns, the waving, the stopping, the message, the sandwich, the cold drink – were acts of service in our reciprocal languages of love. **

The vision of that scene becomes a page that I publish to my memory. I am thirty-six again, carrying our young son through the open field so he can tell his father, in a voice brimming with excitement, “Dad, I just filled the sheep’s water all the way to the top!”  Paul puts Max on his lap and they ride off together to the pen to inspect the trough, waving back in unison to me.

**see The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (1995)