I’m a slow-cooker, a machine. I’m with child and only nine weeks at that – swollen, tender, and unengaged. My boys whirl in fast-motion  relationship around my slow space. They build up steam, and they laugh or fight it out. Mostly, I cradle my face in my hands and try to think non-nauseating thoughts, but even in all the green, I’m having a lot of those waves of happy, where I feel tears press into my eyes.

“How blessed we are,” I say this a lot.Three boys and a man I love, who loves me. We’re healthy. Negatives are only mild discomforts. Even then, a flash of winter fear threatens me a little, an old habit to let the cold suck all my vitamin D and smiles away. I fear it a little, but I laugh at it, too.

Don’t we all have too much Promise to be afraid of winter?

This past weekend, I was alone with Seth on a little vacation. We got lost on our winding way into the mountains of Missouri, and though I was as car-sick as I could be, we enjoyed the extra hour we spent in the car. Farms were on every side, and as we drove along the spring dotted with trout shadows, we stopped beneath a tall, mangled tree. A pair of majestic bald eagles perched there. One dropped and opened up above the road before us, and I cried.

I wouldn’t trade having been lost for much of anything.

When we got there, we shopped and we ate fine meals, and we slept in a hotel, which is always good for a marriage. Let me prescribe that to you if you’re having  a hard time in yours.

The first morning we woke there, we looked out our window on the ninth floor, and thick clouds were quickly cloaking the mountains. The lake water reflected sudden black storm. We turned on the news and heard we needed to find shelter from the storm, a possible tornado. So we made coffee, put on hats, and walked to a small table by a glass wall on the bottom floor.

We watched the rain beat down, tarps flap in wrong directions, and trees do back-bends. We talked about Grandad, beautiful women, how we’ll love until we’re old, how the grey is coming, and we know it, and we don’t care.

Blue hinted at the sky. The trees stood still, and we were still sitting there talking about love in the morning breath. It was a morning that stretched into lunch-time.

I wouldn’t trade the storm for an all-blue sky. In marriage, in life, it’s the good thing to take it all, the Winter and the Spring, to let the Promise help you see more clearly into and then beyond the season.