Rooms

My husband said he had many lives, which got me thinking.

So have I and each with vivid memories starting with my childhood bedroom and its throne-like dresser and marble arm rests. My window overlooked a sloping roof where my Dad made reindeer footprints one Christmas. I still think it really was Dasher and Prancer and his cohorts.

One wonderful year of college before marrying. Such freedom. The rest of college was as a married woman with a disapproving husband. I loved the studying.

An Army bride in German catapulted into a different life that would change my goals for ever.

Being a mother is ongoing even with an adult, adored daughter.

What I do find interesting from each life, there are people who pop in and out. Some are there for decades and with others there are decades between face-to-face meetings.

A couple from our Army days turned up on Facebook. We'd seen them even after we were back stateside, but lost track because of move after move. I'd tried to find them ever so often, but their name Smith made it next to impossible.

They were on a world cruise and we met up when the stopped in Nice. Except for a wrinkle and gray hair it was no different from when we were sharing adventures in Germany, including my and Rosi's first flight after a misadventure at a TV tower.

This week it has been especially poignant with the now grown son of Danish summer people. Small amounts of time together do not mean that those times lack depth of feeling.

My current life is a bit of shock to me. I am so intensely in love with my husband, an emotion and relationship I thought I would never have and didn't want (stupid me). He took me from one wonderful life into another.

I walk thru our flat and see him writing away at the other end of the living room and feel so at peace.

We have treasures like the Andorra palette-shaped rock, which one of our local artists gladly turned into a tiny, tiny palette with his dabs of paint for us. We pull memories out of every day much like a fishing crew with their nets filled with the gifts of the sea. Things, are not people, but reminders of people and experiences. They add to life.

Some of people we are intensely close to we lose track of forever. There is a sadness without regretting the time. There are others that become more than friends, family of choice as those from my trips to Damascus and the woman who lived across the hall from me. And if I spent 11 years sharing a home, the change does not mean the end of friendship, merely a morphing into a different, but still valuable one.

Poor Rick is still being introduced to people from my life and will ask, "Who is this again? Where do you know them from." I can say, things like school, Army, Digital, Polaroid, credit unions." He nods and learns why they come.

I suppose I could think of my life as many rooms starting back to my childhood room where I really believe Dasher and his friends trod. And the room I am in now is not just a mansion but a château of happiness.