BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH
Cindy Maddera
"Fire pit!"
We had a really nice weekend with most of it spent outside. Yard work turned into attending a St. Patrick's Day parade in Brookside. We ate green cotton candy and pizza. The Cabbage played with the neighbor kids and then that evening we built a campfire and cooked hot dogs. Then those same neighbor kids and their mom came over and made s'mores. The kids and Josephine ran around the yard while the adults chatted around the fire which was nice because we got to get to know our neighbors. And I like her. And get this. Her husband is a ghost hunter. That's his hobby. He was actually in Tahlequah, OK that evening on a paranormal investigation. Nicole, the woman next door, had sort of grown up in that house. It was her grandparents and she said that she had spent every summer vacation there. Her grandmother spent as much time outside as she could tending to her garden. There's this large stone structure in the back corner that I have been curious about forever. Did it used to be a chimney or a well? Neither. Nicole's grandmother had a large Virgin Mary shrine set up there. I'm really sad that it's gone. We talked about schools and homes and teaching teenagers math and we talked about Chris.
The next morning I was sitting on the couch with my coffee watching CBS Sunday Morning when they mentioned something about the Ides of March. A little bell went off in the back of my head somewhere and I said "Oh...yesterday was mine and Chris's wedding anniversary." Michael said "Wait. You were married on Pi Day?!" "Yeah...I guess I did get married on Pi Day." I had never really thought of that before or put the two together. At the time Chris and I got married, Pi Day wasn't a thing. No one cared about 3.14159265359 and how that corresponded with March fourteenth. We had originally picked March fifteenth, but then remembered the Ides of March thing and moved it to the fourteenth. It was Spring Break. These where the things we were thinking about when we picked that day. Saturday, I gave zero thought to it. When I remembered on Sunday, Michael asked "Do you think that's why Chris's name came up so much yesterday? Like 'hey, hello, I'm here'?" It makes sense.
I feel a little guilty that I forgot our wedding anniversary. This would have been sixteen years. Traditional sixteen year wedding anniversary gifts include a silver tea set, a flask or a fountain pen. I would have gotten Chris a fountain pen, feeding his pen fetish. Chris has been around in dreams lately in his usual way of just being present. Last night, I dreamed that he had started selling baked goods out of the garage. I remember that walking up to him in the garage was like seeing an old friend you hadn't seen in a while. We even talked to each other in the same way. I asked him how he was doing and said that I thought the bakery was a good idea. It was obvious that we'd both moved on to other things. It was sort of like the end of The Way We Were when Katie and Hubbell bump into each other on the street. We were happy to see each other but awkward because we'd both moved on. I woke up wanting a cranberry orange muffin and a little sad to not be the girl who ironed her hair straight any more.
But I'm not that girl any more and it wasn't our politics and convictions that drove us apart. I had only one choice and that was to move on. Though I don't like the sound of "moving on". It sounds like I'm leaving things behind. I'm moving forward while respecting the past. At least I hope that's what I'm doing.