...I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. (Jeremiah 2:2)

I was still very much in shock---still holding the positive pregnancy stick in my hand----when he asked me to marry him. Life changes in a flash----crossing the living room to answer the phone; a truck's wrong turn on a slippery road----but also with a little red line, and unexpected joy. We crossed the threshold, we stepped out into the wilderness. We didn't think about it (who does? who really does?) 

We didn't go to work and drove to the Nile (we were in Uganda) and had some champagne. The water of the Nile rushed past us, the big lovely river bending around the rocks where we sat. We were by a camp, the banks were patted down and the river accessible. The rushing water was very loud. It was a Tuesday and there were few people around (I don't remember any, in fact). It was warm; the sky was blue. Big old hawks did scary circles in the sky way up. He spent time trying to open the champagne in creative ways. Then he made work-related calls. I stared at the rushing water, dazed. We were suddenly poised on a moment, and though we didn't mention it, we sort of knew it. From here, after this sunny quiet day by the river, life was going to get a bit more complicated. 

I had rafted on that part of the Nile when I had first arrived in Uganda a few years previous and just thinking about it made me feel sick: I had no desire to raft ever again, ever, ever, ever in my life. Ever. I love gazing at water in any shape and form, but I am adverse to entering rushing, rocky, crocodile-infested water. I find no thrill in it at all. I don't trust the rafting company, I think it's a scam. I don't even really trust the world, if you must know. That day I spent rafting (interminable torture) I lived steeped in a stiff and cold dread. The others were cheering and wha-hooing but I spoke to no one. I was just getting through each moment, dreading the next.

Then the boat flipped, which they warned us it would do ("It's the best part! Wha hoo!"). I was tossed into the rapids and sucked into an air pocket of space, with a boulder over each shoulder that lifted the river so it rushed down above my face. I could breathe. I could look up and see water and the sunlight pouring through it, and I could think peacefully about this really disgusting way I was about to die. And then, I popped up as if the rafting company paid the river for this experience to make suer we got our money's worth. And I lived. I lived! The air felt good again.

Taking the leap out into the rushing water, crossing out into the wilderness, committing to a life together with a man I could hardly know because how can you hardly know another? That is what I'm talking about. A devotion that leads you into the wilderness. Its many perils, how could you ever know when you first stepped out? But then you live another day. Because, after all, we are still here, we are right here. 

Painting: "Right Here," oil on canvas (12" x 12") by Margaret Sweet (2010). For enquires write to margaretlsweet@gmail.com

We lived (for those months) toward the end of a long tapered peninsula. The land was so narrow where the house stood that from every window there was a view of water. The house was built over 50 years before, on the crest of the hill. It had a wonderful porch on the front and the back. It smelled like ocean and worn-out wood floors and wood stoves burning and cold glass windows. We lived there---well, I lived there with him and with his roommates. I was 18 years old and he was 20. That seems young now, but youth---age---is so relative. I thought he was old because he had been at college for four years and would be graduating. I was young, because I had just arrived and hadn't even obtained a driver's license yet. 

I had been discontent in general and then I met him, and, suddenly, I was completely content. One night in the freezing winter of Maine, at one party, everything changed. What had been a grey and white, meaningless landscape was now a campus and a winter seeped in beauty and color. I was amazed at my good fortune to have this happen, and I kept quiet for fear that words would scare it away. 

All the time that winter we would stay up all night talking. The sun rose over the slate-blue bay out the window. The rising sun began with a strip of orange that burned above the pine trees across the bay. All night, talking and smoking and talking and smoking and then it was morning. I had found it very difficult to step into the waters of college life. In the years following that first year, I would often try and fail to enter the rhythm. I could feel the swarming around me; I was aware of the structures and ceremonies and repetitions and camaraderie, but I could so rarely participate. I couldn't find the entry point, perhaps. I couldn't make it happen.

He was in a band and played the guitar so well. Everyone marveled. Usually the band played at fraternity parties or college weekend things, but one night he played at Morton Hall. We drove into campus after dinner (which felt backward and adult), and he set up and they played. After, in the colonial room with the busts of college presidents, and elegant side tables, the niches with vases of flowers and the smell of formality, everyone was in a great mood and drinking wine. It was a clean, well-lit room and the conversation was fun and giddy. And when we drove home it felt like a different night from when we drove in. It felt cleansed. A full moon made the landscape absolutely shimmer in blues and silver, and just before we reached the house we pulled over and watched the moon over the bay.

Imagine. It's been over 20 years. I'm trying to think if I've pulled over to gaze at a moon or at a bay since then. 

"Island Painting" by Margaret Sweet. Text (inspired by the painting) by Emilie Oyen. 

 
 The house was just off Route 16, north of Boston, in horse country. Our friend did not have horses, but her husband was a polo player and they had horses in Argentina or Palm Springs, I can't remember which. Did she ride? No. Tennis, mostly. She is savvy and beautiful. I have often laughed and sometimes wept at her stories. I love her because when she says, after dinner, Let's have another splash, it generally becomes a bottle, and she's one of the few left in the world who smoke without apology and with glamour. 

The ball room, with the high ceilings and lack of use, felt chilly even on this August night. Excuse the boxes, she said, shushing them aside as one would a dog. I've been meaning to get those put away... We stepped around them and walked out to the patio. It had rained earlier in the day, but the rain had ended and a very weak sun was breaking in for dusk. The world was damp and dripping. The field behind the house was flat, wild and muddy. It smelled that perfect after-rain summer smell. Even now, five years and a lifetime later, I remember the soft peace of that field.  

The peace lasted, and we had cocktails on the patio, and then something disrupted the baby. The baby was a couple of months old, and my husband was in Congo for six months. Everything had been fine all summer, but I think the dogs came out, or maybe it was a ghost we later speculated, because this otherwise calm and unflappable baby suddenly would not stop crying. I walked her. I distracted her. And eventually I went upstairs to nurse her. 

It had been a horrible and gut-wrenching goodbye with my husband at the airport, knowing it would be six months. Everything would be fine, I knew that---we had support and resources, and everything would be fine. But it felt very World War II to see a father kiss his new-born baby goodbye. I secretly cried for two days then thought about all the spouses leaving behind their families for Iraq that very month, and I pulled myself together. The baby had been a sweet baby all summer, but I was tired from the burden of responsibility. I had dressed and gone out this evening for the first time in months. Oh, how I dreamed of that previous life I had lived, of wine and leisure! But it was not to be, not yet. 

Upstairs the ghosty feeling of family life past filled the halls. Photos on the discolored mansion walls. Smells of adolescent children rushing in, closing doors, rushing out. The carpet was old because they would probably be moving out soon---a year or so---the house was too big now with the children moved away. The husband was rarely home, and she spent her winters in Palm Springs anyway.

The baby and I retreated to the master bedroom and I walked her and nursed her and tried to soothe her. Nothing worked, she was totally flustered. She was spooked. I walked her again and wondered what my husband was doing right at this moment. My image of Kisangani was like a Graham Greene novel: lurking shadows, murky rivers, cigarettes and gin. We are a young family, I thought to myself. In my mid-30s, I was not a young person but we were a young family, just a few months old. It felt odd to be at once quite established in life, and yet so totally young.

Evening approached slowly. The baby still would not sleep. I walked and nursed and looked out the window at the summer field. The field was still peaceful, quiet, perfectly still. I resigned any hope of returning downstairs. They had started dinner and when someone came up to ask, I said It's ok go ahead. I was a mother and I loved this baby with every inch of my being---I wasn't angry at her---but I was tired, and I did want to cry. I wanted to sit down at a table and eat a civilized meal. I sat down for a moment and the baby began to fuss and I let her fuss a few minutes before I stood up to walk her again.

I stood up, and something amazing: out the window, in the field below, seven white horses had materialized. They were grazing like spirits in the mist. Steam rose off their flanks in the cool evening. Seven white horses suddenly and nothing else. They were caught in my breath; at once ethereal and solid. They were like messengers, I think, so reassuring. They had beauty and soul and each other and they were totally at peace with the field and the summer and the beauty of now.

Over the course of the Christmas week, New York City---its body, its sky, its shores and waters, its tunnels and shiny silver surfaces and settled, darkened windows---the creature that is New York City---had a separate agenda from the festivities of us humans. It was distracted by a force greater than itself. Yes, like a benign, monstrous shape in its own process of transformation, or purification, or metamorphosis. 

*

One morning, a taxi driver who hailed from West Africa took us down Park Avenue to Grand Central Station. All around us, taxis were spinning and whirling to get up the hill that we had hardly noticed as a hill. The sun was shining and the taxis were stuck, the taxi drivers were practically crying with frustration, and people were helping and having a good time slipping around and feeling the wilderness, as they tried to push the taxis up the hill. 

*

The snow is soon tended to, the taxis on the streets shush gently along. The winds are fierce, and the snow left along the edges of sidewalks is black or yellow, and too hard to jump in. The kids try anyway and are disappointed, but now we must rush across an avenue---Quickly! Quickly!! I said hold my hand! quickly! hurry, love, please!----and suddenly, burdened with two school bags, pictures that must not be crumpled, gloves that DO. NOT. WORK., whah, I'm tired. I'm hungry whah. I want to take a taxi but we don't have the money for taxis, whah. Everyone is whah. The subway is packed and no one likes my stroller hitting their calves. And Haakon tries to get up now... Please sit Haakon please... Is this 77th? Excuse us! get out quickly guys! Hurry! Yes I'm coming hurry! excuse us thank you excuse us thank you thank you thank you blah.... 

Steep narrow stairs lead up to 77th Street and so we begin to ascend. With the kids dragging themselves ahead of me, and me dragging the stroller behind me, I suddenly feel a weight lift. A woman has---without asking---picked up the stroller and lifted it so high that my burden is practically gone. "It's like an angel has come!" I say to her. "Yes," she says. Her accent is heavily Japanese. "I am angel!" she is matter-of-fact. She puts the stroller on the sidewalk and turns away flitting off in the opposite direction. It is, I promise you, as if she alighted, and then departed. 

*

And what would you like for Christmas? asked Santa. 

A metal detector, replied the five-year-old girl with the pink bow in her blond, curled hair; the delicate dress and matching sweater she had chosen so carefully that morning. 

Santa, startled for a moment, pulled back and had a real----real---jolly laugh. The elves went into hysterics. Liv started laughing too. The mother of the family waiting in line behind us burst out, which made her kids laugh, and their laughter send a spark back down the line like some sort of fire of joy. Everyone was delighted! I felt my face break into a real smile, it felt strange! And how I loved my girl for her truth and clarity! We had all been cruising through the Santaland experience with our pretend awe, and our pretend ooohs, and our pretend Isn't it Magical children? And the elves had been all jumpy! jumpy! hurry along! And suddenly everyone burst out in real laughter. Real joy. We were no longer being rushed. We were no longer pretending. We were just: hysterically laughing.

*

The days turned warmer, the snow and sky were gentle----a perfect moment, balanced. We made a snowman in the park about the size of a three-year-old boy. He had pennies for eyes, and he borrowed Haakon's Santa hat, and let me tell you this: many tourists came up and politely asked if they could take a picture, sometimes with the builders, sometimes just of the snowman, sometimes of themselves posing. The children were perplexed, like, Why would you want to take a photo of this dumb little snowman? But ok. 

We were on a small hill next to the 66th street by-pass. Across from the road is the children's petting zoo, capped with flowing, tent-like nets that kept all sorts of birds, both plain and exotic, from flying away, and now they had began to squawk. The outside crows were cawing too, and pigeons were lifting up when a gorgeous, white, bold hawk swooped down from the nearest tree, made his presence known, then sailed back up and rested on a branch. I've seen this hawk before, but never alone---usually there are a few admirers gawking around him.

He stayed with us for sometime. Are you bringing me a message, hawk? Are you a sign of something to come? It's hard not to love a force of such sheer beautiful powerful nature descending down in the middle of the smoky, roaring city. It's hard not to feel it is a blessing.

*

"Christmas is a time to hear again the message of the angels as they announce God's love born among us at Bethlehem," wrote the Rector of the church we attend. I learned something of God's love this year, and I am sure that it still---after all theses many yeas---resides among us. I'd say God's love is in the all Golden Things that glitter the world around us---the spinning taxis, the stranger's help, the child's words, the hawks descent. But it's also in the divorce that brings pain; the poor decisions that bring loneliness; the illness that brings death. God's love is the core of everything. It's the core of every effervescent, fleeting, painful, and beautiful thing----

*

On Christmas Day, it threatened rain all day. The city was silent, silent. It was gloomy and dark, but comforting inside with the tree and the presents and the nothing-to-do but play! (Liv did not get the metal detector, though Santa mentioned in his note that the elves were working on it for next year, and she was fine that that.) In the late afternoon, just as the rain began, Liv and went for a walk. We walked all the way to the MET and back. She stomped through many puddles. We were holding hands, singing different songs---songs we didn't know the words of. We made them up. We walked and walked all along Fifth Avenue in the dark and in the rain. It was beautiful, beautiful.

Image and art by Margaret, Words by Emilie