“As long as we have each other, we can do anything.”
I don’t know which of us first said that. I do know that whenever one of us encountered something difficult, the other soon either put this in a card or said it.
Early in our marriage, Jane drew a sketch with two swans facing each other and cut out the shapes. One was clearly masculine. One had her long eyelashes. At the bottom she had written out “Hubby, as long as we have each other, we can do anything. I love you.”
That little cutout has been at the base of the mirror on the dresser in the bedroom for years. It moved with us from our first apartment when we moved in here. The paper is brittle, but it still spoke to both of us.
Today I had to take the mirror off the back of the dresser to move it into the bedroom at the back of the house that will now be my bedroom. We had planned to move into that bedroom after we retired so the sun would no longer wake us in the morning. It had seemed a good plan when we made it several years ago–and it seems a good one now as well.
In clearing off the mirror, I discovered that the female swan had lost her head–at some point in the last couple of months the paper had cracked, and when I started to move the mirror, the head fell onto the top of the dresser. It was a brutal reminder that physically we are no longer together.
But I felt thereafter that she was here in spirit today. I had expected getting the mirror back on the dresser was going to be difficult. The whole arrangement is top-heavy, and I had this vision of the whole thing toppling over and breaking. But in the event, after a couple of false starts, the thing went together with a minimum of difficulty. It felt as though she were helping hold the thing in place.
There were a couple other tricky pieces of re-assembly to be done this afternoon. They, too, refused to be difficult. In each case, I found an easy work-around with a minimum of effort.
“As long as we have each other, we can do anything.”
I set the swans carefully aside. I will fashion a piece of tape later to put the head back on with. The whole array will return to that spot in the bottom center of the mirror. It will always remind me what we accomplished together–and what we still have to accomplish.
Honey, as long as we have each other, we can do anything. I love you.
