Love is not about the plans that we lay out, or how well we organize the dreams of our lives. Real love, true love, the kind of love that never ends, is about what we make with the day that is given us. Do we waste, do we invest, do we scrape by, or do we build with whatever stones we find around us?
My parents live in a house on a hill on a very busy road. A road that stretches right across this country. East to West. In fact, they were travelling this road nearly thirty years ago barely married a year with an infant and a Volkswagen. They were headed to Maine for a visit, or at least this is how I like to imagine the story. But the car broke down while they were here. My father got a job. And then another. Just out of the Coast Guard, he was picking apples and turning them to cider. He was scooping ice cream. They were taking care of each other and one infant turned to two, then three, soon four. She made her own everything, from clothes to jams to dolls for the girls. He turned down Cornell University to work full time and provide for his family. And one day they bought this tiny house on a hill on a very busy road that they once were passing through.
Today this home is a veritable fortress, surrounded by gardens and fruit trees. It's beautiful and we walk the property and talk about the time we built a village in the woods or raised a baby lamb in the kitchen. Sometimes I can't believe how much love surrounded us all those years. We were covered with the stuff, just saturated with the blessing of one man and one woman.
So when I think about what it means to love another, I'm always brought back to this image of my parents. Young and completely broke. But determined and flexible and organic enough to know that what they had between them was indeed enough.
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