I’ve lasted more than a day now. At my age and considering my plight, this should be cause for celebration. But I’m weakening now. Only my pain and thirst seem real. My body is failing, and it is everything I can do to keep my eyes open. They will close again in time, and part of me wonders whether they will ever open again. I stare at Ruth, wondering why she says nothing. She does not look at me. Instead, I see her in profile. With every blink, she seems to be changing. She is young and old and young again, and I wonder what she is thinking with each transformation.
As much as I love her, I admit that she has always remained somewhat of an enigma to me. In the mornings, as we sat at the breakfast table, I would catch her staring out the window. In those moments, she looked the same as she does right now, and my eyes would often follow hers. We would sit in silence, watching the birds as they flitted from one branch to the next, or gaze at the clouds as they slowly gathered shape. Sometimes I would study her, trying to intuit her thoughts, but she would offer only a slight smile, perfectly content to keep me in the dark.
I liked this about her. I liked the mystery she added to my life. I liked the occasional silence between us, for ours was a comfortable silence. It was a passionate silence, one that had its roots in comfort and desire. I have often wondered whether this made us unique or whether it was something that couples often experience. It would sadden me to think that we were an exception, but I’ve lived long enough to conclude that what Ruth and I had was an uncommon blessing.
And still, Ruth says nothing. Perhaps she, too, is reliving the days that we once shared.
After Ruth and I returned from our honeymoon, we began the process of creating a life together. By then, her parents had already moved to Durham, and Ruth and I stayed with my parents while we looked for a home to buy. Though a number of new neighborhoods were springing up in Greensboro, Ruth and I wanted a home with character. We spent most of our time walking through homes in the historic district, and it was there that we found a Queen Anne that had been built in 1886, with a front-facing gable, a round tower, and porches gracing the front and back. My first thought was that it was far too large for us, with more space than we would ever need. It was also desperately in need of renovation. But Ruth loved the moldings and the craftsmanship and I loved her, so when she said she’d leave the decision up to me, I made an offer the following afternoon.
While the paperwork with the bank loan was being finalized – we would move in a month later – I went back to work at the shop while Ruth threw herself into her teaching job. I admit that I was nervous for her. The rural school where she’d been hired largely served students who’d grown up on farms. More than half of them lived in homes without indoor plumbing, and many wore the same clothes day after day. Two arrived in class on the first day without shoes. Only a handful seemed to care about learning, and more than a few were fundamentally illiterate. It was the kind of poverty she’d never before experienced, less about money than a poverty of dreams. In those first few months of teaching, I’d never seen Ruth more frazzled, nor would I ever see her that way again. It takes a teacher both time and experience to formalize lesson plans and to become comfortable in even the best schools, and I often saw Ruth working late into the evenings at our small kitchen table, thinking of new ways to engage her students.
But as harried as she was during that first semester, it became plain that teaching such students, even more than the artwork we eventually collected, was not only her calling, but her true passion. She took to the job with a single-minded intensity that surprised me. She wanted her students to learn, but more than that, she wanted them to treasure education in the same way she did. The challenge she faced with such disadvantaged students only fired her enthusiasm. Over dinner, she would talk to me about her students and would recount to me the “little victories” that could make her smile for days. And that is how she would describe them. Ira, she would tell me, one of my students had a little victory in class today, before she proceeded to tell me exactly what had happened. She would tell me when a child unexpectedly shared a pencil with another, or how much their penmanship had improved, or the pride that a student demonstrated at reading her first book. Beyond that, she cared for them. She would notice when one of them was upset and would speak to them as a mother would; when she learned that a number of her students were too poor to bring lunch to school, she began to make extra sandwiches in the morning. And slowly but surely, her students responded to her nurturing ways, like young plants to sun and water.