It's been more than 18 years.
We were in the sparsely furnished living room of college friends, on the bottom floor of the duplex that would be our first home together, though we had no thought of that at the time. Tish Hinojosa was crooning a ballad on the CD player, and we were fumbling to learn the Texas two-step. It didn't come naturally to me, or you. At some point, you overheard me say that I wanted to marry someone I could dance barefoot with in the kitchen.
Later, alone together in the car on the way back to campus, you said, "If you don't find someone to dance with barefoot in the kitchen, keep me in mind."
That was the beginning.
That summer, we were engaged. I joined your family on a trip to Myrtle Beach, and we danced barefoot under the moon, the crash of surf nearly drowning the tunes from the boom box on the sand.
A few months later in October, we danced the Texas two-step for real, in Texas, at my sister's wedding. I also danced with my new brother-in-law, a Texan, who quickly set about reteaching me the dance.
We had learned it wrong.
Most of our dancing through the years has been at weddings, though we didn't dance at our own that December. And in our first kitchen, we didn't dance, but tiptoed, so as not to offend our rather sensitive neighbors beneath us, they who now occupied the living room that had witnessed a beginning.
Five years later in our kitchen in the rental in Indiana - you in grad school, I bringing home the bacon - we danced barefoot. That time it was around and on a copper plate, stepping in a soap solution, then slipping, sliding, trying to keep balance. Graceful was out of the question. Rusted Root's
Cruel Sun blared from the stereo in the living room. From that dance came an intaglio etching, a flat memento in black ink on paper, of movement and music and together.
In our next kitchen (the one owned by the bank but with our names on it), you danced solo with Luan and grout and tile, pursuing perfection in renovation between studio and critiques while I drove and worked. Together was harder to find in those long, weary days.
Four years of those days brought two more mementos in black ink on paper - calligraphy and seal declaring an MFA conferred and a tiny footprint announcing a new life - that led to a new kitchen, smelling of fresh construction. I danced solo on the shiny linoleum, learning to be at home, to be a mother, to cook and manage and all the other things that were also new. Still striving for perfection and control while tentatively embracing the free form of grace.
As distance of belief spiraled us apart, I often imagined it coming right again. And in that, I imagined us at a dance, you loving me into graceful with the touch of your hand at the small of my back.
Our kitchen now is kind of like us, not new and not finished. Major changes have been made, but the tile that will make a great floor for barefoot dancing is on a pallet in the garage, awaiting time and energy and means. The floor in its present state defies clean. This L-shaped space is the hub of a life that never seems to measure up to the perfect that drove us both in the past; the busyness of four little girls and two grownups living and creating leaves it in a constant state of change, often chaos.
We've not danced in this kitchen, except sometimes with words and glances, around those spirals that haven't come to rest.
This morning as I read and prayed for you, I reflected on the years, and the dances, we've shared. And the dances we've missed.
And, this is what I want to say to you as I wish you a happy birthday:
There are steps of the dance we have to relearn.
We will, no doubt, stumble at times and step on each other's toes.
Our dancing will never be the stuff of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (but who cares when it's just us in the kitchen?).
But, when you are ready to dance, I want you to know that every line on my dance card has, and always will have, your name on it.
