Valentine's Day

From the time that I was a little girl I had the biggest imagination.  Living out on a farm far away from others as we did it was easy to let my mind wander and come into a great big world that didn’t exist outside my own mind.  Chores, down times, lonely times, any of them were filled with these great stories that I created around whatever I was doing.  It was easy to be in my own little world so to say, a different person entirely.  Perhaps the reason that writing comes so easily to me.  And on the times that I read, which was every spare minute that I could get I was those characters each and every one in those books. 

I’m still that way when reading is involved and when I wander around the day I still play out what I am doing in my mind as if I am writing my own story, but my alone time or work time or even my lonely times I can no longer imagine myself someone else in some amazing fantastic world.  I can still imagine the story there as if someone else’s life but no longer my own.  I’ve wondered over the years what about me has changed to make it so.  Have I grown so old that I have forgotten the magic?  No.  I’m still an insane story teller, just ask my little ones the stories that I have made up for them.  Has the hard world around me drawn me into cold reality that I have forgotten the magic?  No my life is more magical and every year more happy than the one before.  So what is it?

Revelation came to me the other day.  The light above my head lit so brightly I had to shade my eyes for a minute.  I can’t imagine my life differently, because I don’t want my life to be different or to be someone else’s.  I am so completely happy with who I am and what I am about that I don’t need to create these different worlds for myself anymore, not that I’m not still obsessed with crawling into a book and seeing someone else’s imaginary life for a while or creating them for others to read, but I am completely content with my own.

Why is that?  Because I truly have a novel or fairy tale or love story more beautiful and more filled with amazing happily ever afters than any story that could ever be written.  I realized this of course when I was at the very end of a beautiful love story that I was reading just the other day.  I found myself saying over and over, “That is exactly something Jason would have done,” or “Jason would have been so much better at that.”  The man in the story was strong, and in control, commanding and completely protective all the while gentle and kind and completely in love.  He was strong and a manly kind of man who didn’t go about life as if some game, but he was serious and the people around him respected him, but when it came to love he was a complete romantic.  The Darcys or the Edward Cullens (the book version so not the movie version…) type and I realized that even they couldn’t hold a candle to my Jason. 

One time I went to the movies years ago with my sisters and sister in laws.  Jason had known that we were going and he was more than happy to see me go with them, I believe we watched one of the first twilights and he was completely content to stay at work as did the rest of the guys.  He worked that day close by to the movie theatre and instead of going straight home when he was done, he went to the movie theatre which was up north of our little town and parked his car and waited for us.  When I came out still in the high that the movies bring, chatting with my sisters about what we had just seen, there he was leaning against our car, all six foot two of him, and his calm penetrating stare was filled with such intense love that I tingled from head to toe.  I remember at the time thinking that after all of these years of marriage he can still do that to me more than any movie or any book.  Of course he just came to say that he loved me and he wasn’t trying to interrupt our sister time together and gave me a kiss to tingle to my toes to then return me to my sisters.  He would have driven away right then not wanting to take me away from my night out, just needed a quick moment to say that he loved me, but I was still jello inside and jumped right into the car waving goodbye to the girls as we went home.

When I think of Valentine’s Day I can’t help but think of love.  The whole day is centered around it after all, and when I think of love I think of Jason and not just about how much that I love him, which is to the moon and back and beyond words I guarantee you, but I think of how he loves me.  Some of me gets a little sad because it feels as if I have it all, beyond what anyone else can comprehend and I feel as though I’ve stolen some of the glory that maybe should be spread around.  No marriage is perfect but I know that ours has something more that even the best marriages have and I don’t quite understand why I deserve that, or how I will ever completely understand it.  My heart aches it is so full and I don’t quite know how to give that to someone else, but somehow Jason found how to give that to me.

The world can change and roles can change and people around us can change but love this deep is unchanging and unmovable and unless you have it, completely undecipherable and it’s mine and it’s wonderful and my big strong, serious man has found a way to give it to me every second of every day even when we are apart for the last 21 years.  Why would I ever need to imagine another’s life as my own?  Nothing this beautiful could ever be made up in one’s own mind.