It happens more often now. I catch a glimpse of you out of the corner of my eye or with my mind’s eye. You speak to tell me a family truth or about something that has pleased you, some day to day comment or just that you love me still. Your 1970 anniversary poem echoes in my heart, my soul and mind:
“You love me royally, as I love you,
seated together in our garden Kingdom,
keeping up our silent conversation,
clothed in robed of joy of every hue.
For us, our royal love has had no parallel:
It rooted, grew, and like a miracle
spread to the garden where in now we sit,
clothed in the fragrance of God in it.
“And this long miracle is to discover
the inmost me and you,
to nurse no longing for another,
to forge the soul and its desire together
gently, openly and forever.
“Nothing grows but common flowers
outside our Kingdom’s wall.
Here alone the magic lies,
we ask nothing; we have all.”
Patricia my love this poem ring’s even more true as we approach the year of our fiftieth anniversary. Yes my love “the bones and blood remember.” Am I going back to another solitude or forward to the Garden Kingdom you so often dreamt of, the Heaven within us? Have we come to C.S. Lewis’s “God and us?” In this shadows of a shadow that contains our love have we found the entire universe, God knowing himself?