She walks with such elegance (43 reflections on my wife).

I reflect on two decades with this beautiful burst of a beauty.

She watched the waves,

nestled under a gigantic vintage blanket, watching the ocean from her textile cocoon, an iced coffee next to her providing dissonant companionship, and three dead trees provided a Macbeth’s witches triadic counterpoint to her iconic life-exuding presence as she soaked in the present on a 2002 road trip down the Oregon Coast.

I looked at the hotel,

the opposite of a nice hotel; rooms with doors that swung out to the street; I checked our third floor room number as we parked underneath the Travelodge, and not once did she shudder, grimace or conjecture about the quality of our boardings. She smiled, and there have been many hotels and motels and lodges since, some of them nicer, and many…not. And she has still smiled.

On a longboard sometime in May 2007,

she stood next to her younger brother, in their parents’ driveway, linked arms affectionate, camouflage pants and yellow jacket she wore regularly during a certain epoch of our lives.

She huddled for shelter next to the volcano,

the volcano that recently erupted around 27 years previous, and it was the same blanket she once huddled with alongside an ocean viewpoint five years before; my dad and sister stood a short distance away perched along a balcony, daring the volcanic demons to spew forth once more. They didn’t, not while we were there.

On a June day in 2007,

she strolled, pregnant, with her sister and nephew through a downtown Vancouver park, sunglasses and white shirt and crocs; Nancy Sinatra with a camp bag and a sultry stride.

She flips her phone open and grins at me, talking to someone else,

a child - our child! - strapped to her back in a vintage blue carrier, with metal tubes providing mechanical support as Becca bounces her around the kitchen, talking and making lunch, and the girl goes to slumber slowly and solemnly.

It’s blurry,

a photo I love, a little double-exposed, but but her Scandinavian braids still move in the still image as she holds a hooded figure, our daughter, in our bedroom. She sports a jean jacket encircled with pink pashmina, and this is an image I’ve carried around with me for 14 years, a blurry vivid mystery.

In her grandma’s apartment,

she has our daughter try on a vintage nightgown, one handed down over years and decades. The image sequence implies uncertainty veering to indignity and displeasure, but there is one where our daughter grins huge, and with some things, like a photo or a partner, you just need one good one.

There’s a Thai restaurant

we used to visit several time a year, and then we stopped going - or they changed locations? - and for whatever reason it is now a memory; a memory that brings many aromas and remembrances, such as Becca changing our firstborn on the floor, in the corner, on a late January early evening, and the confidence and surety she displayed deftly as she handled a diaper changeover discreetly, publicly, quickly was, and remains, inspiring.

She holds her in the shower,

this little thing of a being, and her tiredness is so great that she’s fallen asleep as the water cascades around and down; Becca’s back is to me and I stamp a permanent copy of her gently kissing our daughter’s cheek as she heaves another sigh, and continues her shower slumber.

Uncle Ron carries a coffee on the beach,

and she carries our daughter plus a coffee, as they stroll and walk and talk and laugh, and am reminded of how many people she has laughed with; how many people’s lives she has brought more laughter and more joy and more conversation into her, and I can’t remember if she bought me coffee too, or just them. It’s a humorous thought, now that I consider it.

They read together

out loud, in our bed, a board book with a cover I can’t quite make out. It’s a July afternoon, and one of them turned one.

Our daughter angrily tries to fight off sleep,

but the lulling of the boat, and the nestling against her mom’s bosom is too much to battle, and she gives up finally, lifejacket inching up her cheek, Becca pulling her in close and warm.

January is raw and rude, the cleansing of a year and brutal entrance to uncertainty,

and Becca snuggles on our couch, with our daughter, and together, they read the only book our three-year old bookbeetle is interested in: Catching Fire, the second book in The Hunger Games trilogy. Coincidentally, Becca has been reading it, and perhaps for related reasons, our daughter hurries to catch up as they gently forage through the pages together, reading paragraphs here and sentences there, and once in a while a full page, before it is decided, autocratically, that the next page must be turned immediately. This is the state we have come to: sharing our reading experiences, and it is both beautiful and fatiguing. A decade later, our daughter will fall in love with this series on her own terms, and sadly, without her mom quietly reading the text aloud. The march of time.

In pajamas, they wait for me with umbrella,

I don’t know what I was returning from, but I know what I returned to, and I will always, and our driveway badly needs to be repaved.

He lay on top of her,

her head rested on her Johnny Depp pillow as she seized the afternoon for a short nap with a one-week old. The moment was calm and tranquil, and her daughter is off-screen somewhere, not seen, and not sleeping, and soon the moment will no longer be tranquil, but maybe it will be for a few more slices of time.

IKEA has couches, many,

and she burrows into one, holding our son; in between is our 3.5 year old daughter, and up two generations is a grandmother, taking a few moments to rest, as best you can rest in a giant store with two young children on a December afternoon.

Her brown boots are pulled up high,

a blouse spills out from beneath an off-centered button-up vintage sweater; her blondness waves down in a casual stylish tangle in our bedroom as she gets ready for some forgotten event; the event forgotten but the getting-ready not. Our daughter mirrors her mom, looking for the right shoes (or boots) with the right dress (or pants). There have been thousands of getting-ready days, but this is a special one that I remember, even if I don’t remember what it was for.

The Portland sidewalks are getting dark,

it’s two days before Christmas and we’re shopping with our kids and each other. The boy wears a black sweatsuit and stumbles along holding his mom’s hand in the holiday-lighted dusk. The girl scampers behind and ahead adorned with a defining accessory for this season: reindeer antlers; an accessory surpassed only by the rascally grin six inches lower. Becca strides along with a hand in one hand and a Powell’s bag in the other; smile matching our daughter’s. I am walking, but my heart skips.

Something crashed against my office window.

I threw open the curtains, fists curled furious, wondering who would deign break the sanctity of my inner sanctum solis, a place where my imagination was autobahn and creativity must fly interrupted…ha! Uninterrupted! The thought, even now, brings mirth. On this 2012 January grimness, I looked outside to find a blonde goddess cackling with her daughter; both held evidence of white water frozen in their gloved hands, boots stomping down the crisp snow underneath. I glared at them, they glanced at each other and hurled twin balls of snow at my poor aluminum cracked window again. It almost shattered. I grunted anger and stomped outside to chase down the snow demons and make them pay dearly.

It was a Sunday,

there was a mirror casually leaning against the wall. I caught a glimpse of us. Me and her, coffee. Me with my Wonder Woman mug I rightfully stole from her because I love Wonder Woman more, and her with a sleek red-and-white Switzerland mug setting on a green-and-blue saucer. We are looking at something on a laptop. She is paying attention to whatever we’re talking about, and there are no kids in the frame, so maybe it’s important. I don’t know. But her attention is not on me. In the mirror I see her reflected holding up her phone, surreptitiously framing a selfie of us, and she is so elegant in her morning hair playing a losing battle at getting pulled back behind her head; it is splayed around her bathrobe, and it may have been a stage in life where I wore white socks with camouflage shorts. It feels now, remembering and creating, that we must have been invincible on that Sunday.

She is deep in concentration at Nordstrom Rack,

her sister is holding our son, our daughter is rehearsing shoplifting or acrobatics or some such life skill on a shopping cart close by. The sisters are examining a blouse on a rack. Brows are furrowed as they discuss, with words and non-verbal, whether this enters their respective wardrobe rotations. When I speak casually of ‘being at Nordstrom Rack,’ it does not convey the correct impression, the correct impression being that her browsing at Nordstrom Rack, or shopping for clothes in general, is an outlier rather regular happening. This is the only occasion I recall where she shopped with her sister here. Or maybe the only one where I was present. One’s hair is in a single braid, the other sports choppy pigtails - or a single? - I cannot recollect with certainty. They are in a zone. It is a moment of beauty.

It’s night, and she runs across the street,

crouching next to a…fire hydrant. She pulls out her phone and deftly, quickly frames up her shot; a shot of a fire hydrant with a white picket fence in the background, as if Mark Twain and Dean Koontz were co-authoring a collection of short stories and need a book cover. This is it. I smile and shoot her in the dark, and somewhere dancing through her phone archives is a collection of fire hydrants, shot with love and precision over a two-year or so period. At least one of them in the dark, dark, foreboding night.

It is 9.33pm on March the 13th and she is sleeping,

sleeping soundly in a small bed, tucked under a flowery blanket next to our five-year old, who also slumbers deeply. On the floor is a boy. A boy in green footie pajamas and wrapped in pink blanket, clutching a stick and trying valiantly to read a Lemony Snicket hardcover by faint lamplight while the women in the bed above sleep in bliss. The day will dawn soon; sooner for some of us, and I hope to spend at least part of the night not orphaned in my bed, alone. But she is with our children and she is at peace. She knows how to snuggle.

Perhaps she could name a Major League Baseball team,

and perhaps she could not. But her lack of knowledge about the contemporary state of professional sports does not prevent her from enthusiastic responses when she learns there’s playoffs or finals or something important going on, and it also doesn’t prevent her from possessing a significant amount of braggadocio when it comes to teaching her children how to swing a bat. I pitch the waffle ball; we two competing teams each made of two players. We are in our front yard, and Mighty Becca is at the bat. She is batting thousand in her head. But after the first pitch - a fastball, as fast as I could throw a wiffleball - she’s hitting a solid zero. I glare, and she shakes her head and refuses to be cowed. I’ll give her that. You probably think this is a happy ending, where she ends up homering off me or something. But that’s the thing. I strike her out. So it is a happy ending, at least from my perspective. I’m writing this, I’m remembering it, and I was pitching, so I choose to remember in that fashion. I also remember how cool it is that she does stuff like this. Like play baseball on late May days with small children and a big fellow with a wicked fastball and a decent slider. Girl can swing, I’ll say.

It is October, and she reads Patricia Polacco’s The Junkyard Wars aloud in our living room,

surrounded by two children. She is moved, sometimes to tears, by the narrative rememberings of Ms. Polacco, and I love the way she feels and empathizes with the lives and feelings of others.

She stands in Pioneer Square, downtown Portland, bundled up on a January afternoon,

our daughter next to her. It took me until years later to realize as she looks at me with a giant grin as I’m snapping a picture, and eventually I notice her gleeful middle finger aimed at me; something everyone around, including me, missed in the moment.

A bag of books and a Trader Joe’s shopping sack in one hand,

a stack of books in the other, she exits the local library flanked by our children. Neither are carrying anything or functioning in any useful sense of the word, but the boy is wearing a homemade mask crafted from felt. The girl brushes back her hair, mid-stride in her strawberry rubber boots, and they embark homeward to work their way through a stack of literature and stories. It is my brother’s birthday. He is not here, but he is 27.

We’re at Powell’s Books, upper-most floor, and we’re getting a pre-Christmas selfie,

her long blonde is brushed over her light yellow jacket and she smiles; a good sport again as she goes along with my whimsical public self-portraits that are bookmarks to our treks and ambles around the northwest. She smiles, and there is still mystery, and that is a part of what I love about her: the Mona Lisa vibe.

It’s half the Ides month, we’re sleeping in a parking lot, in a car,

we drove through the night to see our newborn nephew briefly, and we’ll get some cinnamon rolls and more coffee, but in the midnight gray dawn, I marvel at the number of times we’ve slept in automobiles and on floors and in rest stops and parking lots and on grass and dirt and back seats, and…what a girl. With a grumble sometimes, but always with a heart of grin close following, we make the memories and make the trips in whatever way we can make it. Which isn’t much a lot of the time.

We walk a mile, then almost eight more,

we walk and hike them with four children, in a forest, by the water, until we came to a lighthouse. This is her birthday, and this is how we spend it. She is warrior.

It’s freezing, and we are in a forest,

with her sister and a quadrant of kids. Underneath the scarves and layers and shivering with her sibling, there are grins and lightheartedness and a willingness to embrace the singular trek that still captivate and illuminate and enlighten all around. But it’s still cold. Super cold, which makes sense for January.

She is wearing white, and so am I.

We’re in a hotel, in matching white bathrobes, clinking paper coffee cups together in the room. The kids are in the bathroom, or in the hall, or outside in the wild somewhere. We will stay here one night, which is what we can do. It is a very nice place, nestled deep in the Washington Columbia Gorge, and this family will ensure we max out our quota of hot chocolate, coffee, pool time, and anything else we can cram into our brief stay commemorating our daughter’s 9th birthday. In this moment, it is a silly 36-year old clinking paper cups with a silly 39-year old and feeling more Miami suave than Washington cool.

She is simultaneously nursing a 2-month old and eating waffles at our table,

our table, is filled with people and breakfast makings; there are some flowers and art supplies and toys. A girl does homework and a boy stuffs a whipped cream with a morsel of waffle into his gaping mouth. A goblet of Sharpies provides the centerpiece. She smiles slightly. I will likely never know the precise nature of the smile at this moment. That’s okay.

She is dishing up food in a cafeteria,

the same cafeteria I first met her almost two decades ago. Back then, she was working. Now, she is serving up plates for our children. Yellow plastic sunglasses perch on top of her head and I suddenly have Sonic Youth running through my head as soundtrack. We have never seen a Sonic Youth show together.

I brazenly walk into the conference center, sans ID badge, but with three kids.

A little confidence goes a long way. We hunt her down at the end of her conference. She has brown boots and an official ID badge. She’s got a big smile before and after she sees us, and I capture a picture of her and our offspring just outside the exhibit hall. She’s excited, I love the excitement she has over her profession and about helping people and learning new ways and techniques of doing familiar things.

The floor is yellow.

She looks up in mock surprise as raise my camera to capture a frame of her doing laundry at 10.57pm on a middle-ish October night. The pile is large, and strangely, it seems like the rate our clothes and laundry grows in logarithmic, rather than linear growth in proportion to our family size.

She sits at picnic table, beverage bottle in hand, outside a cafe.

Her hair is styled somewhere between Cyndi Lauper and the girl from Ernest Saves Christmas, except she’s blonde and it’s June 2019. A boy appearing to be ours and wearing a muscle tank top stuffs pita chips in his mouth. His older siblings clink root beer bottles and pretend they’re not root beer.

The vacuum hasn’t self-immolated yet,

as she pushes it up and down our carpeted hallway. A boy lies on the living room floor close by, writing a literature assignment. Another boy sits on a purple couch and scopes out possible Christmas presents and wrap. A short time later, this room will be full of our daughter’s friends, exchanging gifts and talents, eating treats and making merry on a cozy holiday eve.

The world is about to change, and so are we.

It’s March 12. We’re on a field trip. We don’t know it at the time, but that’s it. The last memory of a ‘normal’ school experience. COVID-19 has already hit U.S. shores, but it’s still abstract. No idea of how bad things are going to get. So we exist in the present, and learn about salmon and spawning and dams along the river, together with classmates for the last time for a long while. But through what is to come, we ride and rise through it together.

We’re a year into the pandemic, and she climbs into bed shortly after midnight with Brad Pitt,

and there’s others: Justin Timberlake, Paul Rudd, Denzel Washington. Our daughter, prankster by genetic disposition, has lovingly crafted a photo collage homage of whom she fancies to be the top of her mom’s fancy list. And she’s correct. We almost go wake her up, but don’t. But we do share a good laugh, and then we tuck Brad away for the night, and she lays her head down on her Johnny Depp pillow.

(I made the last part up. Johnny was in the laundry. It just seemed like good closure).

We are just inside the bounds of what’s legal,

which is a good descriptor of us in general. We sit on an old logging access road, technically-ish outside the bounds of where we’d need a permit or permission. We just pulled off with a picnic Becca put together, and we spread out a blue blanket on the ground and throw together pita, hummus, cucumbers, cheese, and other fresh goodies. She’s got her long blonde wrapped around itself in a simple elegant single braid falling over her left shoulder. The boys pick flowers in tall grass, and one strap falls off her jumper. The mountains rise up in the distance, and there are no human sounds from anywhere other than us. But we make up in volume what we lack in numbers.

She has some sort of dishcloth tied around her head, and is looking at me with a come-hither expression of seduction,

but the seduction aspect is undercut by the giant grin and giant horrendous sweatshirt draped on her like spilled honey on Pooh Bear. She knows my feelings on this sweatshirt. It bears the name of our town. I don’t know what’s so awful about it. But it is. It’s just unbecoming. She takes great delight in pulling it out a couple times a year and doing her best runway moves. It’s not supposed to be funny.

But it is.
She is.

And if there’s one bit of advice I have for someone who’s considering what’s important in a life partner, it’s this: (and of course I have many thoughts, but here’s one. And it’s a good one):

If you share a sense of humor with someone, and you find them funny, and vice versa…

that’s a pretty great starting spot.

And a pretty great spot to be at age 43. Happy birthday, you.

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