Weird Little Vision

There's a story about K that I'm not sure anyone else knows...well, there are probably a thousand of those, most of which I don't suppose I'll ever tell, but one in particular has been on my mind a lot lately.

I think it must have been late 2005; K and I would have been lovers for only a matter of months, but were fairly inseparable. I got us tickets for the NEA National Heritage Fellowship Awards at the Lisner, and we met at the subway and walked on over on a gorgeous autumn evening.

Suddenly she stopped. "Whoa," she said. "I just had, like, this super powerful flash, like a weird little...vision? Really vivid and clear. You were sitting at a table in...a kitchen? In a little farmhouse, or cabin. Older, with some grey hairs, but with two beautiful children, a girl and a boy, running around, and you were smiling, laughing, showing them...a banjo? And outside was some kind of rolling hills, farm country, maybe sheep or something? Like, New Zealand or Australia?"

This didn't resemble any kind of future we had ever discussed - I don't think we'd seriously discussed marriage at that point, and I don't think either of us had fantasies of The Country Life. I didn't even own a banjo at the time. But it definitely hit her hard, and stuck with her through the years to come. There were times when the cancer fight was especially hard and scary, and she'd squeeze my hand in a hospital room somewhere and say, "I know I'm going to beat this. I've seen those kids and the Cabin."

Two months ago my wife and I and our two beautiful children, a girl and a boy, moved into this cozy little house in Appalachia. There's no cell phone signal. We get well water, and our chickens lay 8-10 eggs a day, and there's a herd of longhorn cattle across the road. And on the cold mountain nights when I'm lighting a fire in , our wood stove, I remember K's Weird Little Vision, and think, "She would have hated this cold." And being surrounded by rednecks, and not having a Trader Joe's within an hour, or a decent sushi place, or a belly dance community...it would not have been her cup of tea. (It's not mine either, but...it's the place with the highest concentration of people who love my children, and it's someplace we can afford to live, so...here we are.)

And I remember standing on the sidewalk in the autumn sun, a block from the Lisner, smiling at this weird wonderful beautiful woman who was totally out of my league but had undeniably become my world, and her Weird Little Vision of me and those two kids, and how happy she looked just holding that "flash" in her mind.

And I asked her, "And you?"

"Well," she said, "I don't know...I'm there, I'm just...watching, I guess." And, it seemed, smiling.