Thoughts from Jekyll Island: Tying Knots

15 years ago today, I nodded my head in a quick answer to say I would indeed like to go somewhere after church with Kris Kelso. Our first date was a little soup and salad at Pargos on a Wednesday night, and I’m so glad he asked.

It was 7 months later that we first tied the knot.

The ropes stretched along the inter-coastal waterway, they kept nothing, guarded nothing, stopped nothing, but yet I felt the impact of the boundary they reflected. They were threaded through concrete posts and draped evenly between them. On one side the muck of the ever changing, the dry or wet, the tide in, the tide out. The other side of the rope was firm ground, consistency, grass, trees, a place to set foot without worry of what it would sink into or what would stick to it.

Kris and I, hand in hand, had strolled along the walkway leading to a bench that viewed the river. The rope fence was nothing to me, but then Kris noticed the knot. We inspected it, and at first thought it was tying two separate ropes together, but it wasn’t. It was part of the whole. It was a gathered portion of a section of the rope that had been stretched, pulled too long, until it had no shape left.

We talked about our time on an island. What it was to be away from what is real, what is messy, what is purposeful, and resting in something foreign, quiet and comfortable. This was a first for us. Not once in 8 years of parenting had we taken ourselves away from the boys to enjoy a different view for more than one night. Not because we were afraid or adverse, but because it wasn’t practical. Their smallness and need added to the inconvenience of family too far away prevented us. Even two nights away on our 10th anniversary had included a newborn. Not once in nearly 15 years of marriage had we taken a long trip that didn’t involve visiting family. We didn’t realize this aloud to justify anything, we spoke it just loud enough to remind ourselves it was probably good for us.

I looked at the rope and noticed how thin it was in parts. How the stretching had worn it down, but had not broken it. Our marriage too, has been stretched. There are years that wore us down, thinned our conversations and tested our integrity. There were struggles that left us hanging loose, without definition or the character of being taut.

We had been taught though. I don’t remember my parents going away. I don’t remember them packing things up to escape the stiff peaks of normal, for the level beaches of a vacation. I don’t remember them saying they needed to get away for a little while. They couldn’t. Even with family close, even when we were big enough, there were cows to milk, gardens to tend, there was not just life to do, there was life to produce and nurture all around them. I don’t imagine that Kris’ parents took a lot of vacations when their children were young either. Sure a day trip, or a visit to see family upstate, but life was not full of escapes for our parents. Life was full of responsibility, meeting the present with a determination to shape it into something worth our own small imaginations looking back on with fondness, warmth and security.

We were neither of us raised to live for a vacation then, neither expectant of the forceful stop in time it brings. A thankfulness beyond the joy in taking the trip hit me as I realized our own lack of time away.

“We haven’t needed it,” I said, “that makes me feel good about us.”

We tied the knot nearly 15 years ago. We joined two lives, separated the ever changing from the sure. Threaded ourselves through the solid principles that have held us up, measured our character and balanced our pursuits. Then, when the wind blew, the job pulled, the sorrow clung and we began to grow thin…

…we did not run away.

We gathered ourselves up and tied another knot. We didn’t make new promises, we refreshed the first ones. We didn’t cut off the offensive, we stayed whole, winding one around the other, allowing the thinness of the rope, the weakness of the story, the stretched and frayed of the two, to be an advantage in the process of shirring up our individual form of togetherness.

It has never been the escapes that sustained us, retreats are for those who can no longer fight. It has been facing the wind that has allowed us years of battles won. Never him against me, but us against the pain, the insecurity, the deception. Recognizing the loose places and pulling ourselves closer to one another, looping, winding, intertwined into a shape where beginning and end have lost their identity.

How many knots we’ve tied, I could not say. How many more there are to tie, I will not venture. I hope though, that each one is cherished, that we look back and notice. I hope we see again and again the beauty in the knots. From the first to the last, I hope we realize the joy in the promises kept, the encouragement given, the frailties forgiven.

Tying the knot then, is no more a one time act than is the wedding kiss. Repeated without ceremony, without attention, often in the midst of pain rather than celebration, but fully deserving of great devotion we continue the practice and tie the knot again, and again, and again.