All this remembering reminded me of something

Ian and I the summer of 1992 - a few months after our wedding. It turns out I had just found out I was just expecting my daughter in this photo.

In the wake of Myspace, Facebook re-connections and looking through old photos last weekend, I stumbled across this poem by Tony Hogland at the Writers Almanac online. His poem reminds me of my youth, I was full of energy, passion, and possibility and I like how his own reflection captures a touch of what I felt at age seventeen. Minus the drunk part of course (Mom), and the fact that we've never driven away from our love for each other (Ian).

I only live twenty or so miles from where I grew up. I lived in the woods, we got our groceries in a literal one-stop-light town, and I still managed to find love. Imagine that. How lovely, even through all its transitions, that the love I met at seventeen is still with me and loves me in return. That is something I'll never take for granted. Thank you Ian for loving me.

Here's to the passion of youth and to having the opportunity to grow up with the love of my youth. What an amazing journey and we're still walking together. :)

History of Desire

by Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

"History of Desire" by Tony Hoagland, from Sweet Ruin. © The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission.