Awakening

Lifting my eyes from the glare of a laptop screen, the wall clock catches my eye -the clock made from a slice of an Oregon juniper tree…the clock that I’ve had since our first Christmas together.  At the time I’d been so busy wishing for an engagement ring, that I’d missed it. Missed the importance of the gift. He had given me a piece of his home. A piece of himself. And here we are, in our living room, almost thirty years later, and that clock is still ticking.

Settled in his chair, under the familiar clock, is the giver himself. He, too, is focused on a laptop screen. Some TV show or another fills the room with chatter and catches our attention every once in a while. It’s an ordinary week night. In this simple, ordinary little house. The walls and the shelves hold memories and mementos from different chapters of our lives – oil paintings of Paris street scenes, photos of the kids as they grew, books and scrapbooks and a small handful of trinkets. My mind starts to wander, but I’m distracted by my husband, and a question he’s got about the show neither of us are really watching. We banter back and forth about how he never pays attention, and how he’s always asking me too many questions, and return to what we’re working on.

As I sink more deeply into our worn out green couch, the television is silent for a few seconds and I hear the ticking of that clock. That clock that has kept time through every stage of our lives – the only thing we own that has been with us since our beginning - in each home, marking every extraordinary milestone and ticking away through every ordinary day. Tonight its very presence awakens in me an acute awareness of what I am living in this moment.

HE is my home.

And our nest is far from empty. Everything we have lived and weathered and built together is in this room. Not gathering dust on the walls or the shelves, but alive and thriving between us. And this threshold we are crossing into the next phase of our lives we cross together. I’m struck. Love struck. Awe struck. He’s still the one. The only one I’d want to look up and see from across this ordinary room on this ordinary night. 

This piece was inspired by the Bigger Picture Blogs Writing Circles prompt "awakening" in the Life-Out-Loud genre. It was edited after critique from fellow writers. Join a Writing Circle and take part in the writing process at a whole new level!

Also linking up today with Just Write at The Extraordinary Ordinary