A Few Honest Thoughts On My Third Wedding Anniversary

Gina Elrod Happy Equestrian This girl (a little trivia—she is a champion equestrian and English show jumper)) came into my life over twenty-two years ago as a platonic friend. For seventeen of those years she was like a sister to me. Five years ago we quit being siblings and became lovers. Three years ago today we became husband and wife. We are not perfect. We have made some wrong choices but somehow, miraculously we have managed to arrive at the right place.

During the past five years we have wept at the tragic death of her 32-year-old daughter-in-law Kelly, suffered through a lengthy diagnosis of terminal illness and treatment for Gina, and mourned at the layers of difficulty and devastation that surround divorce. We have lived more places in the past five years than we had in the previous fifty. We have walked together through unspeakably difficult times.

But we have also laughed together at the adventure of life. We have lived in friends homes, my nephew’s home, at a loft apartment in downtown Austin—at a mansion in Westlake, and our first home in Leander, Texas—various hotels, a recording studio, our second home in Lebanon, a 30 foot well-loved RV, in a one-room isolated cabin in the mountains, and hopefully in a couple of months we will move into our third and what we intend to be our final home. We have finally found our place.

We are removed from civilization as we knew it. Here we have become aware of the most inviting silence: the absence of peers telling us what to do and who not to be. We work and play and eat and sleep.

We leave our clothes in the cabin and run around naked in our garden of eden—like we think Adam and Eve must have done. We smoke and drink and cuss and spit and sit around a blazing campfire and talk for hours. We go out on the deck of our cabin on starlit nights and pee over the railing—well, at least, I do.

We have made a rhythm of dispensing with non-essentials; we clean our clothes in a dilapidated washer behind our RV and hang them on a rickety clothesline to air dry. Like my Mom used to do and hers before.

I am bound to this woman in a relationship so profound it seems mystical, as though I knew her before birth and was born for her. I have located a lot of my dreams in her. And our future looks profoundly alive and full of new interests. She is a nurturer and I am an encourager.

We have quit being wanderers and become settlers. We are deeply at peace and happy. This peace seems a harbinger to an even deeper and expansive contentment—a free and clear relation between a man, a woman, and their place in this world.

We do not long so much to travel to Italy or Paris, but only across the stream or up the meadow to the woods. We sense the adequacy of our place and believe that everything we need is here. We do not strain after ambition or heaven. We no longer feel dependent on tomorrow or regret from yesterday.

Ours is a relationship too profound and exquisite to figure out. This place is our inheritance. We plan to cherish and augment this place, and to encourage and nurture others—but ourselves first.

Our souls are at rest here and with each other. It’s appropriate that our skies are filled with the promise of sunrise. The happy sadness of a sunset is hidden by our mountain. It must be symbolic. And so we plan to ride together toward the sunrise.

What else is there?