these hands

these are the hands i -we- will spend the rest of our life depending on and working with. 

i thought i should tell you, as its been a good many months now, that nick and i are engaged to be married. nothing happened. in that there was no proposal. rather, we just decided slowly as though it were the most natural progression that this is what would happen. we told our families. nick's mother gave us the diamond that belonged to her mother's mother's mother, anna.  eventually we told our friends and larger swaths of our family. and now, here i am telling more of you. because as time goes on, and i wear anna's diamond, i want to tell everyone that nick will be my wife and i his man. or however it goes.

nick and kate. kate and nick. he is my other half. my truly good half. he is my balance. he is my temper. he is my compass. he was the first man i met in san francisco. he was my housemate. then my roommate.  he is my best friend. he is the only man in the world i have met that will lay down in the barnyard with me and nap with our cow. he is the only man who will put up with my crazy. he is the only man who will sit me down. day after day. to remind me to eat and to eat well. he is the only man who will quit a good, paid life in a far off city to work with me for nothing or for little. he is the only man who will make the bed in the morning because i insist he does, and then watch me re-make the bed later to my precisions. he is the only man who sings as horrifically bad and off key as i. he is the only man who knows that all i want from town is a butterfinger.  he is the other half of my soul. when he is away i am forever looking around, with words trapped on my tongue. with thoughts half formed. he is neither my fiancé nor my betrothed nor my boyfriend. nor my husband to be. he is my partner. through and through. i had never known the meaning of the word until i had made one in nick.

we are worlds away from having an actual wedding. that is something neither of us could put together right now. we will. but not now.  we are already starting our life together. we are building our farm. we are building a life in vermont. we are doing every bit of it side by side.

we picked ramps for hours yesterday. we went down after lunch, to the sloping wet woods where they have spread like fire. and we dug and picked and shoveled and forked well into the evening.  rachael stopped by to give us news of potential barn kitties just born, to drop off some tomato starts and cookies. she continued on her day and we continued on our harvest. we picked pounds and pounds. nick had the idea to sell them in boston. true to my character i resisted all the way. i hate making money. but this is life. this is our life. we need to make it work however we can. and i need to help my partner whenever he needs the other two hands. and so we harvested til sundown and cleaned well into the night. nick milked winnie as i packed the last of the ramps. we dragged ourselves back to the house and fell asleep watching high fidelity and eating breakfast for dinner. nick drove to boston this morning and i am here, tending the fires of the farm.

some days i am overwhelmed with the simplicity of it all. this is how life will be. this is how life is. our hands look like this now and we are only 28 and 29. i can't imagine how they will fare another 60 years. it is so thoroughly exhausting but i wouldn't change it, or the man i live it with, for the world.