The Life We Write Together

This was inspired by and written as a wedding gift for our most excellent friends, Kelly and Martin. Keep two-stepping!

I walk into the house dropping bag and keys and other detritus of my day, making my way from street into home. I make it all the way to the kitchen before I am arrested. I stand perfectly still. The house swaths me in exquisite quiet. Breathe. Listen. Linger. I hold my place in the subtext: ticking clock, hum of the refrigerator, muted street traffic, an unexpected sweep of wind tightened into a gust by the narrow ally, chimes knocked into cascading tone. Vibrations outside of my own personal cone of silence.

I savor the sweet solitude that will be short-lived, preparing for the onslaught of beloved bodies to come.

It is in stopping, listening, lingering, that I stumble into the sacred while standing at the kitchen sink. I used to try to force my way into such moments with mystic incantations of sentimental bosh. I have learned instead to recognize them with gratitude as they graciously come upon me. In the lingering caress of early morning tenderness. In the goofy antics of a father in adoration of his newborn daughter.  In the xoxo texted into my day.

If I try to collect such moments and press them into beads to string into a necklace, they evaporate. Ubiquitous, sacred moments shapeshift like water droplets—liquid, vaporous, crystalline in rapid or eternally slow succession. It depends on where you stand. Or if you are standing still. Or whether you can linger.

We make things holy by setting them apart.  By choosing the one over the others, and making that choice over and over again. I choose you. In this moment I choose you. And again I choose you.

And so I also choose coming home to this home. I choose the argument over the rug, or the milk, or the efficacy of replacement windows. I choose the art-making. I choose complicated entanglement and the yearning of distance. I choose confession and absolution. I choose the broken latch on the front door and the family photos and the children who think we are wise, funny, exasperating. I choose the stability and the risk. I choose the adventure.

I choose to linger by the kitchen sink, waiting for the arrival of your arms around me on your way to making dinner.


Copyright © Anne E. Kitch 2014
photo credit: Sophie Kitch-Peck