My Heart and Hers Are the Same

I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again;  Evelyn is the rock of our family.  She is the steady one, the strong, remarkable woman who remembers what to do and when.  It is not the professional historian in the family who serves as the keeper of the family history, but Evelyn, who guards it carefully and zealously.  In our family, Evelyn is the keeper of Christmas and Easter traditions.  She and her three sisters—Rebecca and Marilyn and June—and her extended family maintain a close, loving relationship.

Wesley and Cammie Jo love and adore her, and so do I.  My claim to fame is that I know what she is thinking, even while she is thinking it;  she does not have to utter a word.

 My favorite Avett Brothers songs are “I and Love and You” and even though Evelyn and I were married in December, “January Wedding.”  In “January Wedding,” one of the brother’s sing:

“She’s talkin’ to me with her voice

Down so low I barely hear her

But I know what she’s sayin’

I understand because my heart and hers are the same.”

After we married in 1982, I often quoted the Robert Browning lines to Evelyn as I reveled in young love that I knew would mature and deepen through the passing years:  “Grow old along me!  The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  Our times are in his hand, who saith, `A whole I planned, youth shows but half;  Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!”

I still believe the truth in those Browning lines, but while I do trust God, I have to admit that I am also sometimes afraid.  One thing that I was not afraid about was the recent hullabaloo about the world ending on May 21.

When a church member asked a wise minister whether he was a premillenialist or amillenialialist or a postmillenialist, the minister assured his inquisitor that he had read the book of Revelation and that he was a panmillenialist.  He said that the Lord would make sure that it would all pan out in the end.

As I have revealed to you before when I am fearful or anxious about other things, I turn  to my faith and to Evelyn and then to Wendell Berry.  Berry has surely written about his relationship with Tanya in his poem “They Sit Together on the Porch,” but he has also written unawares about my relationship with Evelyn in a few years.  We are not far away, after all, from an empty nest.

“They sit together on the porch, the dark

Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.

Their supper done with, they have washed and dried

The dishes—only two places now, two glasses,

Two knives, two forks, two spoons—small work for two.

She sits with her hands folded in her lap,

At rest.  He smokes his pipe.  They do not speak,

And when they speak at last it is to say

What each one knows the other knows.  They have

One mind between them, now, that finally

For all its knowing will not exactly know

Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding

Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.”

“One mind between them, now.”  “My heart and hers are the same.”

When it comes to a love so fine and deep, both Wendell Berry and the Avett Brothers have written a great truth.