I Learned About Lingerie Through Loving

After many long years, I re-read her first letter, and remembered, as if it were my first reading, its fine musical intervention into my life, carrying its own breath, long lines, short ones, and setting real the lost images. It was the first of many beautiful letters I received from my wife during our marriage.

There had been many such letters, just not recently, and all written with the sound of the sea close by. Three decades on from that first letter, I’m busy with household chores, touching up the paint around the house, green and yellow, her favorite scheme, and walk out across the shoreline every day.

Other letters talked of places visited, Rome, Amsterdam, Ruth and Knud’s bar; words that recalled a child’s smile, given from the window of a passing bus. Such memories flood my eyes for their beauty. But the letters I loved most were those that spoke of her love for our home, the times she spent in the garden with snow on her ground, the creaks and sighs the house made during winter’s north easterlies sitting close to the fire with the comfort of my arms about her.

She writes… these sleepless nights; I wait for a sign, a sound, a whisper… echoing the words I have loved and known so well. I trust in your compass to return, turning you inland, knowing tomorrow my footprints in the sand will have gone, but never from your heart.

I place the letter down on the table, under the blue and white Anemones, and stare out the window across a shoreline shrouded in mist. Out of sight, the waves bring a mingling of auburn hair, while tricky tides fondle her breasts. It is absurd to feel grief so far along; the joy undone. Turning from the window, again collecting the letter into my hands, I read on…

… after the doldrums my sentences spiral like blue delphiniums, ever higher, reaching, impervious to the blandness of the day beyond this window. You are my home; when you’re here I feel centered, powerful, happy in the wholeness of our love, its dignity and security captured by in your shadow. We were childhood sweethearts. If I could turn back a day, or a thousand, and find a single line that sums it up, it says: all for you, everything I have made from my life and with my life: here it is — what I have done down twenty years from crying over a child in the cradle, to sobbing in the spotlight of your absence, every laugh and long sigh in between was but preparation for now.

I kiss the paper on which her words still shine. I earned my toys, my tinsel, and my time with her. What we had in common was a love of the written word. It seemed we also appreciate the part of the world we lived in. Our love blossomed., first on an island, then Paris, arm in arm, in and out of the beautiful fashion shops, choosing La Perla underwear from the lingerie section. I live out my life near the sea, which shows itself in my work more than any other subject. But I learned about lingerie through loving.

I never wanted to be a man in a woman’s imagination. I am not anything more or less than I say. If there is beauty, let me not alone be responsible; for beauty comprises two things, what she gave out and what I returned.

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Note: The author of above italic words, along with our youngest son, died in the Estonia Ferry Disaster in 1994.