to move up and down
We’re kissing on the sofa. Fast drops of winter rain assail the window, so loud they drown out the soul record Bon Iver chose for our afternoon cuddle. Outside, a CRACK lights the sky and we start, for we’ve both seen the same shadow dart past the calf barn.
‘Marigold’s out,’ Bon Iver says throatily. His breath is short from the most recent bout of fervent kissing. He throws on the green Frostline rain jacket his mother sewed for him–short in the sleeves, but he loves it–and makes for the door. But he comes back to press his his cheek to mine, his wide eyes reflecting the coruscating lightning.
'Baby,’ he begins authoritatively. 'When I return…’
The wind roars.
’…I’ll need you to warm me up,’ he finishes softly, and he slacks into my arms like a sweet pea vine in summer sun. I rub my nose into his hair, he squeezes me one last time, and he lurches out into the gale to save the pony.
The skin on Bon Iver’s thigh is red and raised from his shortcut through a field of stinging weeds. I fetch him a bicarbonate dressing and show him how to hold it to his skin to ease the burn.
‘I want to scratch it,’ he says quietly.
‘Don’t scratch,’ I suggest.
A few moments later he whimpers, ‘I want to scratch it,’ and I admonish him sweetly, distracting him with a kiss–which works for a little while. But soon I see him brushing close against the sugar hawthorn in the yard like an impudent horse.
‘Have I changed since we met?’ Bon Iver wants to know.
My hand goes to his face, feeling the soft pile of his beard and the warmth that never leaves his cheeks, even when he’s scared himself with one of his own jolly wintertime pranks.
These thousands of days have produced more creases from smiles than tears, but both are represented. The longest winter left an argent frost in his hair, and it never thawed.
He’s more perfect to me today than he has ever been, and I gasp when I think of the thousands of days ahead.
'Grow old with me,'I beg him in a whisper. 'The best is yet to be!’
Bon Iver attended an outdoor sewing class at the old skating rink in town, and I filled my skirts with sweet staining berries from the overgrown lot next door. When we met this evening, my nose and mouth were red, and his fingers were swollen with needle pricks.
We nursed ourselves with good gin fizzes. He gave me a little drawstring bag with a pink lining. Inside, he’d tucked a love note of the usual sort, a bottle of golden oil from a market stall, and a bead from a necklace I thought I’d lost years ago.
Bon Iver and I were lying in bed far past dawn on a lazy Sunday. He was silently stroking his beard, and I was watching the crystals we hung in the window cast their dancing light on the ceiling.
“What do you think the meaning of life is?” I asked him.
Without hesitation he responded, “To squeeze every last drop of love out of the washrag of our hearts into the bucket of mankind.”
And then he tickled me with bearded kisses until I begged him to stop.
Before I knew Bon Iver, I was a little broken.
I saw myself as a conquerer of the world. I tried my best to acknowledge my flaws, and to use the strength they gave me to push open the doors of every new opportunity. Bang!
I’m the same woman now, but I’ve begun to move more slowly, with more intention. Bon Iver didn’t change me. He only showed me that I could use my power for more delicate things. I could be gentle with a bird’s snapped wing. And I could be gentle with myself.
Bon Iver lays the bird on the grass. We watch as it discovers its new gait, tests its new wing, and leaps into a tree. ‘We’re all a little broken,’ he says. 'But if I fly in a circle, it’ll bring me back to you.’
Bon Iver makes a dream board. He pins pictures of horses and prickly pears and wide open highways. A little bag with a collection of river stones hangs from a nail. Wedged in the corner is a drawing of a baby chick, an old dog and a skyline of lodgepole pines. He borders it all in a grosgrain ribbon from the sewing box. He hangs it on the kitchen wall and stares at it for hours, nibbling peanut butter cookies.
When all this is done, he goes into the music room and records a new song in one go, makes a single tape, and buries it in the woods.
‘This is my mandala,’ he says.
Bon Iver brings me a pork chop as an afternoon surprise. Bon Iver fluffs up the bed, even though I rolled out after him. Bon Iver fills my ‘I Love Books’ mug with dandelions.
He is damp and dirty from chores and cooking. (I haven’t left my writing table today.) He has lamb fluff and wood chips on his flannel. (I’m wearing the socks he knitted for me, and my fingernails are clean.)
'This is awfully nice,’ I say, as he braids my hair.
'Baby, you deserve it,’ Bon Iver says. 'You work so hard.’
Yesterday it snowed, but Bon Iver was as happy as a spring lamb in his rocking chair with his stack of seed catalogues and a big jar of apple tea. Flakes whomped upon on the old house–the wet, unproductive stuff that bends trees but hardly whitens the pastures. Inside, Bon Iver hummed and rocked and licked at the end of his pencil, filling in the order sheet for sweet peas and heirloom tomatoes, berries and corn.
Today the snow is gone and the sun is warm. Bon Iver sits on a hay bale, planning the garden. I join him for a while, feeling the hot breath of the sun on my neck and shoulders–a pleasure I’d forgotten.
Bon Iver seems to read my mind. ‘Winter makes us forget,’ he says. 'Baby, the joy of spring is rediscovering a warmth you’ve come to believe you’d never feel again.’
Sometimes Bon Iver likes to pause before enjoying a meal, just for a moment, to express gratitude or share a whimsy, and today he wipes his buttery fingers on his lobster apron–the one I bought for him in Harpswell Neck–and closes his eyes, his lashes like the wings of little brown birds on his dirty cheek.
‘I’m the luckiest man alive,’ he says simply, and takes my hand, and we sit together quietly on the log and he gives me a squeeze. The air is new-spring cold, but I’ve never felt more warm.
And then we open up our tinfoil envelopes, burned black from campfire coals. Bon Iver surveys the brilliant pink salmon and new potatoes inside, flecked with good green herbs plucked from the mountainside, and he licks his lips with satisfaction as the steam rises to meet them.