Sidewalks

On the union of marriage and keeping a Union together, side-by-side

When my husband and I were house hunting for our first home, I had a hard requirement: sidewalks. Sure, most people think about square footage, kitchens, how many bathrooms, yard size and the like. But for me, it was pavement. A composite of materials that when spun together create a foundation that holds the fullness of your weight and those alongside you.

As a romantic newlywed who always dreamed of having kids, I imagined our little ones toddling along those sidewalks, holding fat round pieces of chalk in their wee hands, drawing smiling stick figures and rainbows; spelling out cat and dog and whatever other words they were learning, like fuck—which is a word I learned at age six when I found it scrawled across the road by using my new phonics skills.

I envisioned them learning to ride their bikes along the poured concrete. My husband would hold the seat of their bikes for stability until they yelled, Let go! followed by that little kid scream that lives somewhere between terror and pure delight. I pictured our future children walking along the poured path to their friends houses, or setting up unlicensed and unregulated lemonade stands to sell a thirsty passerby some bittersweet relief on hot summer days.

The only sidewalks I had growing up were along our town’s Main Street. A Main Street with useless businesses. There was a store where you could buy miniature trains and penny candy, a gun shop where deer heads watched you from above and stuffed turkeys perched on the walls. There was a place called Maria’s where you could get greasy fries and flat sodas. And there was another restaurant called Olde Town, but no one under 40 ever stepped foot in the place so I have no idea what it looked like inside or what it served.

There was one place though on Main Street that I loved: the library. I’d casually stroll the section with grown up books, trying on what it’d feel like to be an adult. I’d check out Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clarke feeling quite pleased with my ability to even consider such a heavy tome. I’d read about elaborate murders getting stuck on wondering what a chignon was, and decided, based on its apparent effortlessness, that I would have to learn about it if I was ever going to be a protagonist in my own life.

It was a small, rather sad town where people kept suspicious eyes on anyone who had “funny ideas” about things. The man who wore a driving cap and would stop mid-walk to paint little scenes. “Oh you know him,” they’d say. “He’s got a funny way.”

A town where sidewalks ended inexplicably, eventually forcing you to walk in the road. Drivers would honk their horns at you when you did, as if you’d had any choice at all to get out of their way. Neighbors who never left their yards, or off their porch perches high up and removed. The self-appointed kings and queens of their lonely little patches of grass that got mowed every weekend, and never once played upon. In fact, they’d yell at you if you crossed them.

A town that prided itself on its Mayberry feel—a set without the laugh track made up by people who looked the part, but weren’t ever real.

I didn’t want that for our kids. And since the hope is for each generation to do better than the last, sidewalks were a must. So when we pulled into a little neighborhood of post-war brick starter homes with leafy trees and sidewalk-lined streets, I knew this would be our home.

For the 25 years we’ve lived here, our sidewalks have seen everything I envisioned, and moments I hadn’t.

Yes, I watched my husband carry our babies home from the hospital. Yes, our sidewalk has been covered in chalk drawings and run along on the way to friends’ houses. Yes, there were lemonade stands. Although it was winter and they sold hot cocoa to raise money for charity.

But what I didn’t expect was how these sidewalks, the ones I longed for, would end up being the foundation for when I thought I had nothing left inside.

“Aren’t you that couple that always walks together?” This was how we met our neighbor who lived on the corner on a beautiful fall afternoon. “Yeah, I see you out there even when it’s snowing and freezing.”

“Yes,” I said realizing if there’s one, there’s always more. Uh oh, what did they witness?

Did they hear my husband and I trying to make each other laugh with absurd bits and inside jokes not fit for public consumption? Did they hear us talk about our work, or us asking for each others’ notes or offering them unsolicitedly? Did they hear us apologize to each other when we accidentally crossed an invisible line?

Did they see the times I patted his bum and told him the squats were working? Or the times he tucked my hand inside his arm giving the illusion of a Victorian couple on a promenade around the park, but in jeans and teeshirts. Did they see how weepy I became when I saw a sign in a yard honoring a breast cancer warrior the same week we’d found a lump?

Did they see the time my husband held me under the street lamp while I cried? When I sunk into him after falling apart, admitting what I didn’t want to say but had to: I didn’t know if I could go on. Did they hear him tell me he loved me and we would find some help?

Did they hear me tell him that if I died, right there, in that moment, it would be okay? That I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

We didn’t always walk. It started in the summer of 2021 in a moment of desperation. We were in the brief moment where the world seemed to be moving towards hope again. Yet, we were in pain, caged animals looking for a way out. Depression diagnoses we should have received years ago. Family who had proven themselves not ready for the fight we’d need them for ahead. Raising brilliant, beautiful teenagers who were robbed of cherished milestones; teenagers who were also doing what teenagers do. The anxiety of remembering our own teenage years, hoping our kids were smarter than we were at their ages. My world-traveling husband kept locked-away at home, unable to photograph and tell the stories he had proven himself trustworthy of sharing. Me having an existential crisis brought on by a deep weariness at holding too much together for too long. Me in a state of confusion over why I carried so many things that weren’t mine to begin with. My grief over not recognizing that sooner.

“Let’s take a walk,” my husband said. I, having no fight left in me, put on my shoes and went out the door.

My husband and I met in 1992 at a party I wasn’t allowed to be at. A stroke of fate that still feels like a scene in a movie. He remembers the windbreaker I was wearing and the jeans. I remember his warm smile, long blond hair and salmon-colored sweater.

Of course, I loved him instantly. We were inseparable immediately.

He would write me love letters and tuck them under the windshield wiper on my car. I’d walk out of class to see the folded bit of paper waiting for me. I’d smile for the first time of the day. Sometimes there’d be a flowers. Sometimes little gifts.

After school, I’d drive to his house and we’d kiss or make out or watch the tail end of a soap opera together. Shows we’d watch with our mothers. Shows I’d fake an illness for just so I could see where the plot line would go, hoping the couple would be able to stay together forever this time.

We became each other’s home.

He asked me to marry him on top of the Empire State building because we were taken with a Nora Ephron movie. We’d get married in a church because we were good kids who did what we thought was expected of us. The priest, who married us, giving us a piece of advice I still cherish onto to this day.

When our children arrived, my husband would come home straight from work and hold them while they cried so I could escape to our bedroom and cry too. We’d find each other again in the evening, having only enough energy to find the remote and sit on the couch. Sometimes we’d hold hands, others trying to keep our eyes open long enough to feel like we’d found a decent enough moment to count as “together time.”

Our kids tell us their friends say we’re the type of couple that actually seem to like each other. I try not to feel bad about that. People have had no problem telling me we’ve set our kids up for failure—an impossible standard to achieve, they say.

When we were just starting out in our professional careers, I accompanied my husband to his work’s holiday party. His coworker, a man further along in years—clearly full of wisdom about how life actually works—too a look at us and said, “You two are so adorable you just know something bad is going to happen to you.”

When people tell me how hard marriage is, I nod fearing I’m somehow doing it wrong because I don’t actually agree. Marriage is work, but it doesn’t feel hard, it feels effortful.

I do, however, listen with great empathy when people tell me how hard marriage is because I see how much pain it brings when relationships you’ve relied on fall apart. How it could feel to be trapped with someone you no longer walk with, or who has now chosen a different path. How it can destabilize your world and what you thought you both held dear.

“All things in life have a natural tendency to decay.” That was what the priest told us as we sat in his office that day asking him if he’d marry us. “Think of a garden. Ignore it and it perishes. But put care and attention into it and it grows. It flowers. It produces beautiful things.”

When someone asks me about relationships, of which I am only a qualified expert in a singular one, I tell them what the father told me. Because despite my lack of belief in his particular flavor of god, I must admit, the man got this one right.

The neighbor is now looking at us with the kind of eyes I can’t tell are full of suspicion or just half. I wonder what she must think. “Yeah, you’re out there even when it’s snowing or raining or cold,” she says. Maybe it’s just curiosity I’m reading, but on the edge.

“It’s our routine,” I say. It’s too vulnerable, too sacred to share for a first meeting with someone who I can’t get a clear read on.

If I had, I could have known if she was ready to hear the truth, which can a hard thing to take if you’re not prepared right. The truth is that walking a path alongside each other—a path big enough to hold us both across the million little moments that make a relationship, and a life—is our sacred ritual. We’ve been through all the storms, all the calm, all the darkness, all the light.

And I notice, across our nation, it’s from sidewalks now that neighbors gather to keep careful and heroic watch. It’s from sidewalks that they blow their whistles to alert each other it’s not safe to go outside; that parents and caregivers help children, teargassed by monsters, wash their eyes.

It’s on sidewalks where people play music, hold signs, and sing songs to disrupt the rest of those hellbent on taking away our own peace and freedom. It’s along sidewalks that neighbors gather shoulder to shoulder, connected by time and space and commitment to each other to battle the rot and decay the priest warned us of all those years ago.

It’s from sidewalks and walks along each others’ sides that we say, We choose to grow together. We have no kings to rule otherwise.

I can’t seem to write anything about life these days without acknowledging this moment we’re in together. A piece I started months ago about a routine that has deepened my relationship with my husband has turned into thoughts about sidewalks and then about community. And ultimately, our togetherness. How everything has become a constellation in which I find meaning and hope, as it has since our beginning. Hope for the future ahead. A future brighter than ours for the next generation and the ones that will come after.

So, my friends, may I ask you a question? Aren’t you the ones who walk together no matter the weather?

Yes, I do believe you are.

Deepest gratitude to the good people of Minnesota for being our North Star, keeping watch, and showing us all how it’s done: together.