Exploring, by Lewis

Lately, I’ve been going through my late husband’s copious writings--journals, love letters, poems, or, simply, musings.  For me, it feels much like returning home after a long, long absence and walking through old neighborhoods.  There are places and features of the landscape that are fresh in my memory, some that were dusty but are now bright with color, and others that I perhaps never noticed or had long-faded from memory.  There are faces and names that have been obscured by time that his handwriting has brought to new life, as if I were meeting them for the first time.

His love letters are truly amazing—full of exultation for the joy of our early, fumbling trysts and his excitement at our impending life together as a couple.  He was Romeo, Don Quixote, and Don Knotts all putting pen to paper on the same page.  When I read them, it is like looking down a tunnel of love from the wrong end, a 14-year-long journey of discovery that ends, not upon emerging at last into the light of day, but--as all enduring love stories do—when, at long last, death does us part.  It is not an experience that thrills so much as sobers, more like lime sorbet than orange sherbet.  Yet, I spend every spare moment in the doing of it.  It is an exploration that, unlike that for a lost gold mine, keeps yielding the bittersweet nuggets of treasured memory.

© 29 April 2013 

About the Author 

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn't getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband's home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.