Quite a trip indeed! It seems odd to be attempting to write about it nearly a full week later. In all actuality, I wrote about it before I even left.
It turned out a bit too sultry for a public audience.
Think Love in Eat, Pray, Love. Think a little Pray and Eat as well. But first, let’s talk about the area…
I knew he lived in the Appalachians, but somehow I had it in my brain that he lived on the edge of the mountains. What I discovered was that I drove right smack into the middle of them, then turned south for a long while, driving over elevated highways that wove through valleys. There were sky-scrapers poking up from the valleys below! But, those weren’t near where he lives. He lives further south, where not a single big town was nearby. The smaller divided-highway routes around my area were his area’s largest type highways. And then, there were miles and miles of curvy, hilly no-line roads to traverse… some snaking back and forth along the side of mountains, only to scale them and snake back down the other side. These are treacherous in snow and ice. He says traveling them in the winter is akin to a constant “controlled wreck”. I could only imagine. The only consolation is that the trees are so thick that if you veered over a guardrail (assuming there was one), you could get lucky and quite literally hung up in a tree. But who knows…
The house where he grew up and currently lives is literally on the side of a mountain. I forgot to ask him the name of that particular mountain. Do they all have names? There’s so many. But imagine this… it’s a two story home with a walkout basement, in the front. Yet a full wide set of steps ascend up to the center of the “first floor” covered porch with two wooden rocking chairs on each side. I can’t believe I did not take a picture of this, so you’ll have to bear with me as I attempt to describe it. To the left of the stairs is a shed-like door to enter the basement. There are more steps that lead down from the front steps towards where the cars are parked in a 3 car-wide gravel driveway. Standing down there with the cars and looking up at the towering house, the basement begins well above my own height.
Inside the front door the house is open with a family room to the right, dining room straight back, bedrooms and staircase to the left. The kitchen is off the dining room and leads out back to another covered porch with more rocking chairs. Just outside that back door there is a flat-ish area with a patio table… but this seems terraced off because immediately behind that the yard is a steep climb. Two sheds/storage buildings are built into the hill, one higher up than the other. This about where you’ll find two large gardens, dwarfing my own. He has 3 rows of peas (beans?) already growing, each row progressively bigger than the next with empty rows ready to sow all in due time. The larger plants were already hanging from strings draped parallel with the rows. The mountain itself climbed further than I could see from standing there, completely wild. A few weeks back their security cam caught a black bear peering into a rear house window near the dog’s bowl of food. Along one side of the property, running straight down the mountain was a fresh gurgling stream. That stream was so relaxing, a constant reminder of the beauty of the place.
My favorite “room” of the house was, oddly, the upstairs bathroom. It was on the side of the house with the stream and the window was propped open with a fan that I never used. Instead, it let the gurgling stream water sounds waft in like sweet-feeling white noise. Unless it was nighttime, a light wasn’t needed. The window provided more than enough light. It had white paneling half way up the walls and a big bathtub with no shower walls or curtains. What a delightful place to take a hot steamy bath on a cool night. As enticing as that was, I wasn’t about to spend any amount of my precious short stay getting “me time” in a bath. I was there to be with spaceman.
And that’s what we did. We were side-by-side practically the whole time, except when he slept longer than I did, and I spent that time downstairs talking with his parents.
This may sound cliché, but his parents were two of the nicest people I have ever met. Every time we left to go exploring the area, they both got up from their recliners to give us each a hug good-bye. Every evening before we headed upstairs for the evening, there were more hugs! Seriously, these people are sincerely awesome. They truly did make me feel at home there. I really miss that place, already.
The things we did…. OH the things we did! We spent less than $10 (other than my gas to travel back and forth), but we were all over that place, exploring the landscape by car. He also took me the sportsman’s club – a lake with a small campground, gun and archery ranges, stream and woods. It was there that we sat suspended on a two-foot wide bridge above the stream and meditated together. The next morning we went back and tried our lot at fishing, a fail despite umpteen jumping fish! It just means we will go again someday. I truly love fishing and never got enough of it when I was little.
How’s that for a rated G story? Our time together… only our 4th time visiting one another in 11 years (can you believe that!?!)… was anything but rated G.
Do you know how they portray romantic movie love scenes… the sultry steamy lovemaking, the intensity, the hours of ecstacy… a lights on kind of erotic bath… yeah, it was like that. And I miss him incredibly.
I don’t know how we can have so many connections with one another like we do. I’m not quite sure how it’s possible that we relate so well together, on so many fronts, with so much depth. I’m so in love with this man, and he recounts his love for me, to me personally, every single day.
I can’t concentrate. I feel like I’m going to get in trouble for this, eventually. lol I feel like I’m often quite useless at work, you know? I’m off in la la land, reminiscing or dreaming. I want him here and now. Communication through messaging is killer now. It just isn’t enough. It feels constraining. Hearing his voice is soothing. Spending hours on the phone laughing and joking and being serious, planning our future, pondering our present, re-viewing the past… subjects can be anything, anything at all. I’m not beyond certain temptations to reel him in closer. He’s dreamier than life, and I laugh so much with him.
We talk about how we are both “done”. We know we have found the one person we each were born to be with. The mundane comfort level is growing, and the intimacy is off the charts, delicious! I’m not sure how it could get any better than this, but not yet cohabitating… I know there’s so much more to come.
You should hear the sweet, sweet sentiments he tells me each day. No one has ever been as devoted as he is to me. There’s a certain kind of satiation that has occurred within me. He meets all my needs AND desires. Who has been this lucky before??? I haven’t met them anyway, not that I know of. I’m cherished, and loved in every conceivable way by him. It’s not a completion so much as an exaltation. Our relationship embodies an elevated state that tows the line, however curvy. I’m in. I’m totally in for the long haul. I love this man with all my heart and soul and I can only pray he feels it as omni-presently as I feel it from him.
