It’s not even 9:30 in the morning yet, and I’m making quick work of some horseradish pickles I bought from The Crazy Cucumber stand at the market yesterday. Not a choice I’d make on a weekday before heading to work but guess what? I’m on vacation for the next twelve days and last I checked my driver’s license, I’m old enough to own such a decision and all of its consequences. The cats, in various yoga-like grooming poses on the living room floor, couldn’t care less.

With Patrick away at Sundance, I’m more than left to my own devices, from food choices to what time I go to bed. Save for a precisely three exceptions (the two times I went with him and last year’s pandemic lockdown, when nobody went), we’ve had this arrangement on or around the summer solstice for going on fifteen years—him on his way to South Dakota and me at home minding the feathered and furry children, plus a few modest home renovation projects up my sleeve (he only knew about one of them one year—the kitchen remodel. I was at the mercy of the contractors’ schedule and they arrived the day Patrick was leaving. It was hard to ignore the dining room table on its side in the living room and the bathroom unplugged empty fridge on slides heading in the same direction. He made his exit rather hastily that summer). This year is no different. I’m prepping to paint the living room floor, one half at a time, and hoping to put the rest of the garden in after a cool and wet spring delayed planting everything but the onions and potatoes. It’s honest and enjoyable work, but…it’s lonely. After this past year living in such close and constant proximity, there’s a hole in the house’s rhythm and ether that only he can fill. I hear the kitchen clock softly ticking the hours around its face, but otherwise, it’s a thick sort of quiet, the kind that can make your ears ring if you listen too long.

In my mid-twenties as a campus minister, I made the youth retreat circuit giving talks about the virtues and benefits of the single lifestyle. At the time, I was six years fully into it, living in a Tudor-style townhome with beautiful leaded crisscross lattice windows just north of the local university. I was a block away from the paved trail that ran parallel to the river and logged twenty-five miles most mornings on my bike. On Fridays I’d come home, shower and make bread in the tiny kitchen, eating buttered slices while they were still warm from the cutting board. I even enjoyed paying my bills, remembering the good advice Dad gave me, “Pay yourself first, then your creditors.” Visitors were welcome, of course, but I felt no need to add a Permanent Roommate to the lease; I relished my independence and protected it fiercely. I also tested my vocal range on Barbara Streisand’s Broadway music with no one to critique it, cleaned up after myself rather easily and managed with candles when the power went out. At the end of a busy and peopled workday, I came home to four walls and two floors that held a healing silence; I unfolded myself into it with deep gratitude.

Meeting Patrick quickly evaporated the content of my youth retreat talk subject matter, replacing it with the virtues and benefits of having a wholly compatible life partner. A kindred soul who shared and outstripped my love for cooking, fresh ears for new stories and ideas, a trusted companion who received my vulnerability with grace and kindness, and a cheering section like no other for my humble accomplishments because he also had a front row seat to the stumbles and scrapes it took to get me there. I have no regrets. But on these longer stretches without him nearby, the ghosts of my singlehood start whispering in my ear and I take to listening carefully, remembering how I came to enjoy my own company. It’s a valuable lesson that some folks I know wished they’d learned, instead of going from being their parents’ child to someone’s spouse without a pause in between for some helpful self-reckoning. One’s own identity is a road map with many pins, marking the moments where innocence intersected with insights. To know and appreciate the gift of your own tears with no one but you to wipe them away, or the experience of total contentment with all that you’ve placed consciously and deliberately in your life, from the wide two-slice toaster and the missionary-style yard sale-acquired living room furniture to the friendships that you nurture with love and curiosity…such hard-won and thoughtful milestones are the substantive dowry we bring to a healthy relationship whose sentences end with “forever” and “always”.

Of course I want Patrick to come back home. He is that and more to me. But there’s an inviting sort of reimagining of myself that the next twelve days offers. I’m guided by a loosely-ordered agenda that doesn’t bump into his (or those at work), and the freedom of that is both delicious and intimidating. I’m not alone but there are precious few human influences on even the simplest of choices I make. The weather will be a primary framework determining how I arrange my day’s activities, and I’m glad to be back in touch with her again around the clock. It means figuring things out by myself, thinking it through and moving forward, even in a direction that I know Patrick wouldn’t take (if he just read that sentence somewhere between here and Sundance grounds, I’m sure he’s a worried sort of curious). Late Friday afternoon, I was sitting on a new curb-gleaned wooden glider that we set up on the other side of the mulberry sapling circle, facing the meadow, and as I kept one bare foot on the grass, I mused that Patrick’s own feet had touched nothing but the gas and break pedals for the past six hours. No grand conclusion from that image, just the tender acknowledgement that he fills my mind and heart so effortlessly and in the simplest ways. I’m sure there will be others as this vacation unpacks itself. I’ll hear his voice in my ear as I’m painting the living room floor, weeding the garden, making a batch of brown rice (he insists my methodology is all wrong; I remind him I lived just fine on the food I prepared for myself before I met him. He counters with “just barely”, we smile and get about the rest of our married life).

Patrick left Friday morning and it’s only Sunday. I worked the farmer’s market for the first time yesterday without him, in the rain and wind, with my stalwart and cheerful niece Andi to help keep the bags dry and the canopy from flying off in the wind. I napped off and on when I got back home, strolled about the front yard plucking mulberries from the lower branches of the trees and listening to one of the neighbors firing their automatic rifle until well past sundown. I felt strong and independent, calm and capable. Still do. I’m slowly deconstructing the living room, emptying it of most everything but the big pieces. And while I can’t put a firm timeline on this, I expect the novelty of being on my own will begin to wane about halfway through painting the other side of the floor and after I’ve eaten my fifth veggie burger because they’re easy to fry up in the only skillet I’ll be using for a while. I’ll wonder what he’s doing, if he’s staying hydrated in the scorching South Dakota heat they’re expecting for all of ceremony, and start planning his welcome home dinner (no rice. He trusts me with spaghetti and meatballs, though), eager to hear the new stories he’s collected across the miles.

A warm breeze blows the white window sheer across the end table and it’s load of thriving houseplants. For the next twelve days, it’s jut me and forty-one acres of rediscovery, a reassuring pulse that carries everything I love to a heart that carries it gladly. I shall make the most and the best of this sweet and welcome gift until I hear the familiar sound of tires crunching in the driveway.

I can’t lose.