Lakewalk

Yesterday was our Twenty-first Wedding Anniversary. Last year we were in St. Lucia. This year we walked on water.

The Lake has frozen over all the way to Wisconsin. Slabs of ice stack up against each other along the shoreline like mountain ranges. If you can negotiate your way through, you step out onto a vast surreal moonscape of windswept gray and white, crisscrossed with jagged faultlines like an enormous jigsaw puzzle.

Surreal. Moonscape. Faultlines. Puzzle.

If these were Password clues, someone would eventually come up with "marriage." At which point Allen Ludden would give that knowing look.

As the traditional folk rhyme goes:

If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you'll know.

Our Twentieth Anniversary was a cakewalk.

In St. Lucia, we dodged geckos and hummingbirds and were lullabyed to sleep each night by a tree frog in the bougainvillea outside our cabana door. We watched the full moon rise up from the Pitons, and once, I swear, I witnessed the fabled Green Flash as the sun disappeared into the Caribbean. For six days and nights we wandered Paradise with winterblind eyes, drunk with color and light and Brazilian champagne, while the equatorial sun wrapped itself around us like a parka.

Fast forward a year. The Ides of March. Up North the crows are gathering, pairing off, announcing it to the world. They keep up a constant commentary as I run the shore road, beside the frozen wasteland of The Lake. I turn off NPR, more interested in "Squawk of the Nation."

One Spring, early in our marriage, when we still lived in The City, my husband and I found ourselves landlords to a nest of crows in the backyard elm. The parents screamed at us whenever we left the house, and when the nestlings finally fledged, they supplemented their screams with dive-bombs. Fledgling crows spend a vulnerable six or seven days moving around on the ground while they learn to fly, so we became their bodyguards, shooing away cats, postal workers and other predators, and dodging their terrorist parents. One morning I woke to the sight of three fat baby crows waddling up the walk and onto the porch, toward a bowl of water I'd left for them.

One by one we watched them "get their wings" as they flew awkwardly into the lower branches, then higher and higher, until one day, sky's the limit, they were gone.

And then so were we.

Meantime, the joys and sorrows and all the years stack up against each other like mountain ranges, like waves, like baby crows crowded around a yellow water dish.

Nothing so black as a crow. As a Caribbean night before the full moon rises. As the water glimpsed through a fissure in the ice beneath your feet as you walk across A Great Lake with your one true love.

Happy Anniversary, Baby.