Don’t forget your pants!

Beautiful painting by Cezaane

written April 26^{th (6 weeks ago)}

It is a beautiful morning after the full moon last night. The wind blew all day yesterday so the world outside my window this morning is fresh and new and sparkling. It’s like waking up in paradise. A first morning in paradise. The birds are all out. Big pigeons walking across my yard, pecking at the ground as they walk.

The sky is one of the loveliest of blues. Flawless with a wisp of a cloud. The color of a blue diamond, a pure blue with hint of navy in it, but totally lit up the way a diamond would be. Dripping with freshness and newness. Almost alive in its beauty.

And the tree in front of my window, the sun to the east is shining right into it, so it is bathed in that golden light. The  leaves are lit up and turn a translucent green. The rest of the yard is in such cool colors, a cool blue sky, a cool darkish green. Only the tree right in front of my window is lit up in golden light.

And the small tree behind it too. Both desert trees. Desert trees do not have tall tree trunks. Just a few feet off the ground are all their branches with green leaves.

Their leaves are not thick and glossy, the size of a hand, like northern trees. They are like teeny green feathers.

The leaves are all shaped exactly like teeny green feathers. So naturally there are gazillion of them. There is no such thing as density.

I can look at the tree out my window filled with its tiny green feather leaves and see right thru it to all the trees behind it and the blue sky thru it too. Nothing blocks your view. I can see right thru it to the mountains to the north

My neighbor Frank painted my computer room last week and did a spectacular job. The walls had turned so yellowed. It had not been painted since Bill and I moved into the house 21 years ago.

It is a total transformation. Frank painted it 2 coats of the whitest white. So the whole room is far brighter than it ever was.

He is such a peach he even picked up my clothes and papers from all over the floor, and stored them neatly in boxes and then washed the floor.

So the room seems twice as big and 1000 times brighter. And he put Bill’s paintings all over the walls. He turned it into a room of beauty.

It is a miracle of joy for me to have a beautiful new computer room now. After all when I am not lounging on my bed watching tv, it is where I spend all my time.

And he washed the windows for me too so the light pours in. And the view out all my windows is now crystal clear.

It is just as clear thru the glass now as thru the open window itself. WOW! It has doubled all my views. I love it.

He made it into a pretty room when it had been an eyesore before. It is a gift, a very nice gift, Frank gave me. To give me this pretty computer room.

I feel like Heaven is smiling on me. This most beautiful day of all days, Anne is in her new pretty computer room too.

A gift from Heaven and from my neighbor Frank. And a gift from Bill too, since it was what he wanted to do for me, but he went to Heaven so I used his bank account to pay Frank to do it.

A gift from Heaven and from my wonderful husband and my wonderful neighbor Frank.

When a girl’s husband goes to Heaven and he no longer has to take care of her and do everything for her, Heaven steps in. Heaven takes care of her and arranges for everything to be done for her. She is just as well taken care of as when she had her wonderful husband sharing her home with her.

All the movies and tv shows show the girl distraught when her husband goes to Heaven. But that has not been my experience. Distraughtness never entered the picture for me at all.

The first year was a glorious adventure. Suddenly I had a totally brand new life. Nothing was the same as it had been before. Everything was new. New and different.

And now that my second year has been under way for a month, it seems to me the life of a new bachelorette is having fun all the time. All I do is have fun.

It really is a win win situation.

There is nothing as wonderful as being a wife.

And nothing is as fun as having fun all the time.

Luckily we don’t get to choose. Life chooses for us.

My love for my husband hasn’t changed, it goes right on increasing and growing the way it always did. I live inside my love for him just as a fish lives inside the ocean. It is the environment I swim in.

That hasn’t changed, how can that possibly change. That is what marriage or having a mate is. Your love for them is your whole life, and even tho it is infinite it always increases.

What has changed is how I spend my days. Instead of driving to the swim pool every day with Bill, I go with Jim. And the conversation in the car is different because Jim is just a friend.

Altho just a friend doesn’t describe it at all because friendship turns out to be far more interesting and multi faceted than the word implies.

It is a relationship too, but not one bit like husband wife. Giggle giggle maybe it is like two peers.

Marriage is like as if you hold out your hands with fingers apart and then bring both hands together. So each finger on one hand fits into the spaces between the fingers on the other hand. A meshing and a joining. It turns it into a hand clasp.

Both hands are joined together.

Friendship isn’t one bit like that. You really have to remember being a child, before you were a teenager and interested in boys. When your cousin Richie exactly your age was your best friend and you played together all day long during the summers up in the Adirondacks where both your families spent their summer vacation.

It’s as if that relationship is re-created with me and Jim. All we do is play together, all we do is have fun together. And we are two equals. Being a wife is accommodating your husband, which is a joy to do because it is how you express your love.

But being a friend is the full expression of your being, which is so much fun, because it is so much fun to be so free.

That is why it harkens back to childhood, the total freedom you give yourself. Your expression is one of freedom. Where with your husband your expression is one of love.

With a friend the relationship is so out in the open and up front, like children playing with each other. It's like I never noticed the warm affection underneath I had for my best friend Jane while I was a child.

I didn’t notice it till I was writing about her several years ago. And that was all I noticed. It wasn’t obscured by all the games and fun and play. All I saw was warm affection. The intimacy and affection.

It is a bit like that with Jim. We are close, we care about each other, we want the other to be happy. We are both sensitive kind souls. In a way maybe we have turned into each others family.

But what goes on when we are together is all play. And we both love it. It’s one game after another. The way two year olds play with each other. Two year olds are too young for real games, so they turn life into a game. One spontaneous game after another.

And that’s exactly what Jim and I do when we are both in an up mood.

All that goes on is games. The games wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, they got invented as we went along.

An example would be Don’t forget your pants. One time Jim was an hour late picking me up at the Y. When he arrived he said it was because when he was getting dressed at Racquet Club to pick me up he couldn’t find his pants with wallet and car keys in it anywhere.

I guessed another guy had mistakenly thought it was his pants, shoved it into his locker and locked the locker. Anyway that is what it turned out to be after Jim looking high and low for an hour.

When he arrived to pick me up he said “I’m so late because I lost my pants.”

So naturally the next morning when he dropped me off at my pool I called out “don’t lose your pants.”

Which has now turned into “don’t forget your pants today.”

We have so many games going on now based on all our experiences that if someone were to get in the car with us they would not understand one word we were talking about.

We play Officer Jeffries. Officer Jeffries is the girl cop who gave me 2 tickets and was so mean to me back in February.

Officer Jeffries has many variations to it.

It began off when I said “She has a glock, you have a glock. She will show you her glock, you will show her your glock. And then have hot sex together all night.” The next thing I knew Jim was calling her “my bride.”

“I hate your bride” I said to him yesterday in the car.

And I don’t remember what I said or did last week when Jim said “you’re causing me to get a divorce.” Maybe I said “I am going to tell the judge all the mean things Officer Jeffries did to me.”

Altho my favorite Officer Jeffries game is each time he drives into the bike lane (that is what I got the ticket for) I turn around and call out the window “Officer Jeffries where are you! He just drove into the bike lane! Give him a ticket for $270.”

When I tease him too much he says “I’m not the one with comprehension problems.”

I forget all about that, that Officer Jeffries said to me two times “Do you have comprehension problems?”

I forget it but Jim remembers it. 
 “I hate your bride” I say when he throws that in my face.