The bridge is still down, and Bon Iver and I are alone together on our little farm. Battered by these April storms, we can only venture outside for short, frantic excursions—to visit the animals snug in their barns, to secure a flapping tarp or a swinging gate. 

There is no mail to fetch, no visitors to welcome. We are creatures of the indoors for now.

On some days I comfort myself with reminders of my life from before this present predicament, or dreams of life soon, or guesses about what our lives might someday hold. I’ve been wearing my Panama hat, which always cheers me up. Bon Iver bought it for me on the very first big trip we took together. Felix was an elderly man in a perfectly-imperfect linen suit, whose hat shop, an arm-span wide and smelling of hay drying in the sun, was tucked behind an improbably narrow door in that beautiful, tragic bomb-scarred place, Casco Viejo. To show how finely it was made, Felix rolled the hat and slipped it through his wedding ring.

Bon Iver chose a hat that day too, but it was swallowed by the Caribbean Sea. Forgetting that the fino fino is a dry-land hat, Bon Iver performed a majestic cannonball from the gunwale of the catamaran we borrowed from a friend. I brought my hat home and I’ve kept it pristine, and it feels light on my brow when heaviness threatens to descend.

Cheered by the memories, I busy myself with nurturing seedlings in the sunroom. A few herbs and beans are all I have left from last year’s seed order, but they’re the stars of the show during this time of solitude. I listen to Rubberlegs McKindo as the gale outside wrenches the windows and shakes them in their frames. Beneath the racket—the jazz, the wind, the groaning of the house—there is something else, something slow and hopeful, something only the animal of myself can hear: the very earth is humming, low and illimitable, eternal as a gong’s final resting resonance, and every form of life is joining in, finding its special tessitura: the grasses in our field, the oldest trees, the worms in the deepest ocean’s trenches, the microbes in glaciers, the great-great grandchildren of sand fleas that nibbled our knees in Panama, the vines I trained to climb the garden fence (dormant now), and my little seedlings, bursting from their thimbles, reaching improbably for the daytime star somewhere above the clouds, voices pealing the superius note of this uproar, this glorious clamor, and I can even hear myself, my bones jiggling a sympathetic resonance, sustained by my closeness to the Earth, and each of these voices cohere in a mad harmony with one promise: spring will come anyway.

‘Look at 'er bubble!’ Bon Iver says about ten times a day, waving his little jar around. It was cold in the house last night, so he brought it into our bed. 'Yeasty,’ he cooed, his voice thick with sleep. 

Bon Iver’s sourdough starter is his new pride and joy—and Yeasty is her name. Now that we’re locked down here at home, the jar is his constant companion. 

'The thing is,’  he says this morning, earnestly, as he places the jar on the breakfast table with reverence, 'I do feel that I’ve created something wondrous. This experience is truly singular: I have created life! The joy, the doubt, the triumphs—no one has ever felt like this before!’

We break into giggles, because at the same time we realize that he has stumbled upon a little inside joke of ours. We do hope to have a child someday (an idea that is shelved, for now, but germinating) but we can’t help but sometimes laugh at our friends with new babies because their lives feel, to them, just as singular, just as once-in-a-lifetime miraculous, just as biblical as Bon Iver’s life feels today, as he cuddles his jar with its prim dishcloth bonnet.

Since the bridge collapsed we haven’t been able to travel, and repair is impossible until the rain stops. These very same wicked pelter-skelters, accompanied by winds that liquefied the atmosphere, birthed rivers of mud and brought down the hillside last month, along with the pylons. No one can visit us here on the farm, and we don’t know when we’ll see the village again.

Bon Iver and I are crazy about each other, and we’ve often squirreled up here together for cozy long weekends. We’ve felt it’s important to banish the outside world and create together, side by side, planned additions to the intricate spiderweb of our love.

We’re perfect company. And yet… weeks into our isolation, there are so many reasons to yearn for town, and the world, and other people!

I miss my funny friends, Delilah and Ro, who are so close to me it’s as though we were tripled in the same womb, clinging together like orange segments and whispering through the membranes in our own language. I miss their affection and cresting laughter and flowery scents. I miss helping them. I miss rolling my eyes when they are caricatures of themselves. I miss their physical touch, so ordinary and fond and so forgettable until I’m miles away and unable to have it.

I dream of the little alley market. It’s where Bon Iver and I first met, and before we were stuck here, each Saturday we would visit the place where I operated my strawberry stand all those years ago, just to sneak a kiss—a kiss with special meaning, as we marked another week with you in my life.  

Oh, the market! I miss bustle, and brushing shoulders, and hot doughnuts, and egg sandwiches with slippery greens that slide out when I bite (to be tidied up with efficiency by the brown birds that wait at ground level for such gifts), and I miss the goosey wave from Dag in the tea shop every time I step down out of the truck, both of us overflowing to share the trivial joys and troubles of our weeks.

I crave the abundance of the market itself, so consoling during this endless fool’s spring when nothing can be planted in our hamlet for fear of frost. I would buy seeded breads, selected from a wall piled with bricklayer’s precision, wafting their fruity fresh-baked perfume. A few stems of delicate peonies, just peeking around the corner of the season, grown somehow in this deluge using unimaginable magic. (They’d wither in a day, killed by my thousand deep inhalations, but they would be worth it!) I wish I could fill my baskets with the pleasures of the sunnier counties: purple flowering broccoli, artichokes and lemons, anything fresh to spruce up our dinners of pickled vegetables and roasts from the deep freeze.

But wishes don’t fill bellies. So I must survey what we have here, and reach deep inside myself for the cleverness and resolve to make something new of our extended time together.

For all these comforts I must now turn to myself, and to Bon Iver. He’s getting extra nuzzles today. I know that he is missing his friends and haunts as well. He’s a creature of routine, Bon Iver, and he feels that a Saturday isn’t a Saturday without a visit to the dusty row of almanacs at the library and a stroll down the creek, spitting cherry pits or sunflower seeds, or tossing blackened chestnut shells, depending on the season. He feels anxious about his budding kinship with Rafnkelsson, the knifesmith, in whose shop Bon Iver has reliably lurked for a few hours each week this winter, asking questions, hoping to someday be invited to hold the tongs.  

But, like me, Bon Iver must turn his attention to what we can accomplish here at home. I spotted his handwritten list of projects to work on during the time we’re locked down here on the farm. He hopes to mend the north fence, pick up the nyckelharpa, and perfect the flip of a classic French omelette.

He’s been quiet awhile. I rise to look for him, feeling the pinpricks of my anxious heart. But right away I hear him bumbling into the mudroom, slick with rain, having committed himself to his favorite eternal chore: delighting me. He must have shined a torch around the corners of the winter storehouse, and he has come back with a prize! It’s the last of my spicy bread-and-butter pickles, labeled in the finicky calligraphy I felt was so important last August. (Funny how this shines a torch: on who I was then, a woman one winter younger, a woman who feels like a distant memory.)

We enjoy the pickles right out of the jar, spearing them on the slender tines of the forks from my antique fondue set—the ones with mint green ceramic handles, which Bon Iver simply calls ‘pickle forks’. Juice in runnels down his beard. A moment of honest delight. I settle in with this moment of perspective. I could have lemons, but I have Bon Iver. We are safe, we have all we need, and we are here for each other. We will be just fine.

A moment after midnight Bon Iver closes the shutter of our Christmas market kiosk. His lips are plum-colored from our mulled wine, but his eyes shine like the aureate garlands that threaten to tumble from the kiosk, heavy with snow.

He takes my mitten in his mitten.

‘My elf,’ he whispers with a frosty kiss, 'let me take you back to the North Pole for some cuddles.’

I drive the truck (Bon Iver has been sampling the wine for several hours) and he sings O Magnum Mysterium to me in his falsetto, breath visible in the night air: a tipsy angel.

We’re folded up like like a prayer on the sofa. Fast drops of winter rain assail the window, so loud they drown out the smoky soul record Bon Iver chose to charm me. Outside, a CRACK lights the sky and we jump. 

We’ve both seen the shadow dart past the maverick barn.

‘Marigold’s out,’ Bon Iver says. His breath is short from the 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, when I return…’

The wind roars.

’…I’ll need you to warm me up.’ 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.

‘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 downtown, and while I waited for him I filled my skirts with sweet staining berries from the overgrown lot next door. When we met again 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 are lying in bed on Sunday. He silently strokes his beard, and I watch the crystals in the window cast dancing light on the ceiling, swaying from little strings in a breeze from nowhere.

“And the meaning of life?” I ask. We’ve been playing a questions game. The rules are ours, and the game is forever. 

Without hesitation he responds. “To squeeze every last drop of love out of the washrag of our hearts and into the bucket of mankind.” 

It’s typical Bon Iver. And I love him so! And then, of course, he tickles me with bearded kisses until he thinks of a question.

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.

Bon Iver says he can’t stand to be apart from me.

He is squishing me.