Marriage Spices

Yesterday my wife spent two hours re-arranging her DVD collection, culling out ones she no longer wants and organizing them by genre, main theme or actor, depending on which placement seemed best.  We’re downsizing so her collection now has only about 400 DVDs. To an objective observer, her collection and efforts to organize it best might seem silly.  To me, they are among the reasons I love her so much. 

I know good marriages depend on shared values, pursuing common goals and physical intimacy - things that books, marriage counselors, clergy tell you are important when you’re going to exchange vows. They are important ingredients of the recipe for a good marriage, but they leave something out.  That “something” consists of the spices that keep the marriage recipe tasty and always delightfully surprising.  Watching her love of movies, her endless organizing and then her laughter watching comedian Danny Kaye as a bumbling knight in the 1956 film The Court Jester are moments in our marriage I never expected and will always treasure.

She’s a collector not just of DVDs.  Yet her collecting is not driven by an obsessive focus on one thing, which she must have ALL of, but rather is a way to bring joy into our lives.  She loves antiques (candle stands especially), music boxes, quilts, original paintings, game boards and 3-D mobiles. The sound of Mozart tunes on a three-movement music box of intricate engineering fills the room, offering classical respite from any cares of the day.  Amazingly to me, she also can part with her treasures more easily than I can when we downsize, offering to me the lesson that it’s people not things that truly matter.  Consumption, she daily demonstrates, is fine as long as it doesn’t consume you.

Now I know that bees are essential for our food supply and produce luscious honey. For her, they are also a source of continuing fascination, captured by her digital camera. She has photos of them from every angle on every flower in our small garden and beyond (even when her close-ups remind me of the massive mutant ants in the 1950s horror movie Them).  She also captures spider webs glistening in the sun after a light rain. These are her loving appreciation of the small intricacies of nature that pass most of us by because we’re busy with “more important things.”

The same is true of her collection of “mermaid’s tears,” little pieces from glass bottles tossed off ships before the days of plastic and tumbled into smoothness by ocean waves as they made their way to shore. Along with photos of sea birds and jars of this “sea glass” and shells she’s collected on two-hour beach walks (my limit is 30 minutes), these adorn our master bath and daily bring memories of her stooping in the sand to pick up some treasure and showing it to me as if she had never seen one as beautiful before.

I’m a creature of habit.  I like to open the kitchen silverware drawer and blindly reach for the knife I need – only to find that there are now spoons where the knives were yesterday.  Why?  Because it’s more “logical” to have them there, logic that is as oblivious to me as it is obvious to her. This ought to drive me bonkers, but anyone who believes that sameness and predictability are the penultimate groundings of a good marriage is missing what she contributes to ours.

Our nighttime often consists of watching a movie together while I struggle to keep my eyes open.  “Did you hear that last part,” she gently asks and then puts up with my white-lie “of course” while repeating the dialogue I missed.  Sending me off to bed with our signature kisses - always three, her lucky number - she then climbs in the tub for a long, hot soak. I love seeing her surrounded by bubbles and warm (actually, very hot) water as I drift off to sleep extremely grateful that I am wed to someone so thankful for life’s sensual gifts. I know as well that when I come down to breakfast the next morning she may well be smiling at a Facebook “reel” of babies she doesn’t even know who are laughing with abandon. My life is daily enlivened by such moments and her laughter.  It always has been.

I hope that after we’re both gone our children, grandchildren and great-grands will remember these parts of her, some of which they’ll have experienced and others of which are captured in the forty photo albums she’s assembled that capture our years together and an equal number of books created via Shutterfly that contain, year by year, her favorite photographs, other family photos from Facebook and cartoons that satirize politicians and the insanity that roils her in people that forget what they owe to each other and nature’s other creatures.   I hope as well that they will have experienced the lesson that good marriage dishes include the spices that make them so deliciously rich.

Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell

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