Still
     for Tim
  
  
 We met one April evening long ago.
 I make a count of fifteen thousand days....
 Could I have known then what now I know,
 that I’d still be enchanted by your ways
  
 decades and decades on? How can that be?
 We’ve made a daughter, a garden, a home.
 Our shared life is now my reality
 too large to distill for one small poem.
  
 We’ve learned how to dance in our garden rows,
 singing the songs that make our heads spin—
 eyes on the stars, perhaps stepping on toes,
 and still laughing despite the pain and the woes.
  
 Our love is deep-planted and here to stay,
 so I can still whisper, “Love? Let’s sail away.”
  
  
 Leslie Schultz 

Could there be a more appropriate time for a love poem than in April? While Tim and I celebrate our wedding anniversary in early August, we met when I was a freshman in college and he was a graduate student on a balmy April evening. Last night, we were talking about what a turning point that was for us–Fate? Destiny? Karma? Just plain luck? Hard to say, but I know I am profoundly grateful that we did meet in this lifetime. I can think of no better companion.

These days of sheltering in place have, if anything, thrown that insight of good fortune into even higher relief for me. Sequesterd with anyone else, I might well be climbing the walls! Instead we are busy building cold frames for vegetables; planning rabbit-proof fences for the garden; toasting the brilliant stellium of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars; watching episodes of The Great Tours of France and nibbling Brie; exploring the muddy back roads between Northfield and the Mississippi River; and dreaming of booking an afternoon’s sail on the Schooner Hjordis out of Grand Marais.

Tim and I will both welcome the cessation of these current restrictions, but still, slowing down to focus on essentials has been instructive. I can’t imagine a foxhole that is more like a Hobbit hole–good humor, good books, good food, good company–and that is all due to him.

Thanks, Tim!