Nine years ago today, Cathy and I closed on our house. It was a new start for us. We’d found our way back to each other after thirty-four years apart. We’d both left unhappy marriages and had fallen in love all over again. Over the past nine years, this house—our house—has been filled with so much love and joy. It’s been a place of laughter and light and ease. This isn’t to say there haven’t been spats—after all, we’re human—but nothing that’s damaged or endured.  No resentments or significant disappointments. No lingering pain or cruelty. We’ve had our moments of sadness—deaths in the family, friends’ serious illnesses, our own frailty made plain with various hospitalizations. As rock star Jim Morrison once said, “No one gets out alive,” a truism that gets truer as the years advance.

What would the sixteen-year-old Cathy and the eighteen-year-old Lee have thought had they been able to see all the way from 1974 to 2026? It’s impossible to say. I’d like to think they would have gladly accepted all the twists and turns of a life together, but there’s no way to say since they—we—walked away from each other after four months together, not knowing we’d be given a second chance.

Trust me, we know how rare it is to have love revived. We know how blessed we are. The days  in this house—even the most mundane ones—are precious: the gatherings we host for neighbors, students, and friends; the moments when good news finds us; the days when we do chores, share meals, play with our two cats, work a jigsaw puzzle, simply be together. I know all that, and I know this house—with a nod toward lyricist Graham Nash—“is a very, very, very fine house,” and yes, my dear Cathy, “Life used to be so hard/Now everything is easy cause of you.”

In closing, here’s a passage from an essay I wrote for Brevity:

The first spring we spent in our new home, a wren made a nest in a wreath that Cathy had hung on our front door. A dove made a nest in our gutter. A mallard hen did the same in the catmint of our landscaping.

They must feel safe here,” Cathy said.

The wren, the dove, the duck—they came to us in good faith. I didn’t need then, nor do I need now, such signs to tell me that trust binds us. Years ago, I looked into the blue eyes of a brown-haired girl, and it was all I could do to look away. Long ago, Cathy, I made a place in my heart for you. Tended it, kept it alive.