Summer Blush

Thursday, July 2, 2009


It never ceases to amaze me how little I interact with my feelings for my husband. I'm really a terribly emotional person, but in this one area, I tend to be extremely pragmatic. I am very shy when he talks to me about his love for me. It is something that is still so new, and though its depth has been tested by time and circumstance, I find I don't respond easily to his heart.

Most days, I feel like a very slow learner, but some days, I feel like a schoolgirl with my first crush. I suppose the first new excitement of our love has worn away, but I can't help feeling there is something more, especially after long hours to talk and share what we love and who we are with one another.

I can't imagine being in a relationship where both people chose to settle for the status quo and stopped pursuing the other's heart. Stopped wondering about it.

There is a creeping separateness in marriage, I think, ever-so-subtle, driven by time and interruptions and children and work and the dailiness of what we do in our often-separate lives. Fighting to maintain that oneness (or keeping current, as Pete and I like to call it) is really hard sometimes. We're so dependent on God to join our hearts through the misunderstandings and frustrations we both face.

So the other day, Pete bought me flowers. He'd intended to buy them on Saturday when he went out (I didn't know this), but there weren't any. So he bought flowers for me while I was with him, grocery shopping at Sam's. And they are the sweetest-smelling lovely pink roses I've had in a long time.

I always love the pretty, but I love these just a little bit more than I usually do - they come to me at a time when we've been very close, during a period in our lives where we don't have answers or goals or long-term plans, only trust and what God gives us where we are. Somehow, it is easier to stop and smell them, to look at them and feel just a little bit like we've made a home here where we didn't think we would. And it is nice to realize that my love for Pete is a little deeper this week than it was last week.

4 comments:

Alison said...

Aw, I love this. And way to go Pete for making us all swoon!

dancebythelight said...

Beautiful. The subject matter of responding to your love and the image of roses made me immediately think of an e. e. cummings poem (this is just a stanza):

"your slightest look easily will unclose me /though i have closed myself as fingers, / you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens /(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose."

Kelly Sauer said...

What a beautiful poem, Danielle! It's just what I wanted to say! Thank you for sharing!

Tonya Freitas said...

In a lot of ways, I can really relate to what you're expressing here. I find my feelings for my husband to be such a strange thing. No wonder he'll never figure me out, when I don't understand my own thoughts and emotions, yet he never stops gently trying. You said what I could not have put into words.

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