While away, we gathered with family and friends and with another family and their friends to laugh and love what happens when our son and their daughter asked us to be glad for them, and even as good and bright as they are, they cannot possibly know how fine it was to be there as they married. Madison, Wisconsin is a glorious bridge between two lakes, a rhythm of June and January, as happy as a farmer's market on the capital steps, as ambiguous in its urges as our nation is politically, something like a marriage, itself, and when Ellie and Daniel came to tell us that they did, and do, and will love each other, we forgave the mad genius who had imposed a diamond pattern of streets and necessities upon the land between the lakes.
We drove to Minneapolis, to help pack the sweet patterns of lives curving together into rectangular boxes, so that the boxes and Daniel and Ellie and their irregularly-definable dogs and the Stag upon the wall might move back to Portland, Oregon, where they are now, already, having heard the Siren call of that most humane city, knowing how some places call their graduates and their bicycles and backpacks home again. What kind of wretches can turn their backs upon decency and breweries and good food?
Then we turned to where we had spent ten years of our own lives, around Lake Nokomis, nearer and farther, in south Minneapolis, pegged with a marker at the Coffee Cafe on the east side of the Lake, staying with Mark and Patti, going to the Cafe to meet friends almost too dear to name--John and Joel, Susan and Jacqueline, Mary--"Good Morning, Mary!"--and Dennis, and all the human tenderness and fierce argument that happens when friends meet for coffee and good books and outrage and delight that there is a world happening around them.
We drove to Decorah, Iowa, where Mari and I were married, at our log house, to discover how steadily it had kept itself, waiting for our return, where I spent a day trying to demonstrate to it how much it had meant to us to have been married there, almost 32 years before, in our own kind of Solemn High Picnic, nearly as absurd and wonderful, in its own time, as that of Ellie and Daniel at the High Noon Saloon in Madison. I commemorated the happening by barricading the squirrels, as well as I could, from expanding their apartment complex in the walls of our two-story outhouse. I know who will win, someday, but until then, I want to insist that I have a place in the world, too.
We stayed in the house now owned by Gail (my daughter), and Marty, and their two children--Spencer and Sophie--two of the best of grandchildren among many of the best, until it was time to drive west to almost Lake Mills, where Mari had been designated, or elected, or coerced, or agreed, to organize her 50th high school class reunion for Lake Mills High School. It was a splendid time, even for someone like me, a come-lately to the crew, by virtue of our own marriage, years after their their graduation. If there were pretensions, they were nothing new, and very few of them. If there were left-over class and economic distinctions, they were run over by human decency, and an appreciation of kindness and more enduring values.
We turned home, driving almost necessarily toward Des Moines, but very soon drifting west and south down into Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, all the while talking of Taos, New Mexico, and of the pueblo there, remembering having come the other way, once.
"I am a farm girl,", a hostess at a Visitors' Center, told, us, "so I enjoy driving those long, lonely back roads!", so we drove those long, lonely back roads, all the way to Taos, and the pueblo we had remembered, where it has been for a thousand years; enduring evidence for human determination and art.
Now we are home, having arrived here this early afternoon, as tired as toads on a trail walk. Half of the pickup is unloaded, but not unpacked. The rest will have to wait until I am finished with this drink, and until the sun hints that it will go down. The refrigerator is almost empty, but we are not hungry. It has been satisfying. It has been lovely.
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