My soul mate is on a plane to Denver.  Tonight she will visit our youngest, and then she will head north to work with students we coach in the equine certification program.  Our house is quiet, the sky filled with clouds, the earth awaiting rain.

Yesterday we celebrated our anniversary.  We had a relaxed dinner at a place whose cuisine we enjoy.  It was very different from a year ago when our children surprised us with a gala barbecue that filled our home with family, friends, music and laughter.

Reflecting on our years together, I am reminded of a friend’s observation that those who choose marriage end up in three relationships.  They can be with the same person or different people.  I can see that ours has followed that pattern in 20-year chapters.

The first relationship was marked by the passion of exploring the attractions that drew us to each other, creating a life together, stuttering starts in employment and the miracles of four children.  It ended on some bumps that led to a defining recommitment.

The second relationship accompanied a deepening of the professional pursuits we each adopted and attending to parental responsibilities, as our children bounced their way through adolescence and launched into adulthood.

We are now in our third marriage, living many of the dreams that our hearts embraced long ago – children who love and honor us and each other as siblings, a home on a hill with a view, a business of our own that delivers the values of what we have learned over the years.  Did I mention our grandchild?

We continue as companions of each other’s history.  We focus on the joy in each day and gently prepare for what lies ahead.  With deepest gratitude we celebrate the blessings that have come our way and that we are to each other, one marriage of three relationships.

We spent Memorial Day weekend with our four-year old granddaughter and her loving mother and father.  We also spent time with some of my high school classmates.  It was a bookends experience: the limitless possibilities of childhood, where all the world is a stage, and the more focused potential of our senior years, where the triumphs and scars of experience guide the choices we make in creating our present moments.

The wonder of a four-year old was somehow mirrored in the delight of aging companions.  It is only now, two years after our 50th, that some of us are meeting almost for the first time like somewhat familiar strangers.  Over the course of a leisurely and abundant meal the grace that decades of living have taught us brought stimulating conversations and heartfelt sharing.  Whether formally retired or not, the energy to make a difference still pulses in us.

It matters little whether the connections are new or rekindled.  They are threads of a shawl that will join us together in warmth, fellowship and support for the years remaining.

Memorial Day pays tribute to those whose service and sacrifice made possible moments like we shared this past weekend.  To the extent that each of us celebrates with child-like wonder the days given to us, contributes our gifts to the commons and offers our deepest gratitude for being alive and the freedoms we enjoy, we honor their legacy.

In my morning meditations I have been reading from Wendell Berry’s collection of poems, Leavings.   Today’s selection struck a chord, as many of his poems do.  To my younger friends, may these lines reveal something of what lies ahead.  For my contemporaries and older friends, let us remember the always unfolding newness and possibility of the perspectives that can accompany our aging.

I know I am getting old and I say so, but I don’t think of myself as an old man.  I think of myself as a young man with unforeseen debilities.  Time is neither young nor old, but simply new, always counting, the only apocalypse…Even the old body is new – who has known it before? – and no sooner new than gone, to be replaced by a body yet older and again new.