Loving

Love comes in so many flavors.

Love of friends is a smörgåsbord, sweet to savory, of conversations and discoveries.

Love of family is yeast bread right out of the oven with butter on it, the fragrance of home.

Romantic love is creme brûlée with raspberry sauce--or maybe pie in the sky.

I just watched my last  class in Sketchbook Skool.  I've gotten behind on doing the assignments, but I've liked every class.  The final was my favorite because it was all about road trips. Teacher Danny Gregory took a cross country car trip and showed us different ways to capture travel memories in  maps and sketches and words.  He gave us the daunting assignment of sketching a personal journey in lines and colors.

One of Danny's stops was Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton's birthplace.

I've been to Hope.  There's not much to see there.  But the very name of that town brings up a memory for me.  If you don't have a taste for sappy stories, you might want to just stop right here and go fold the laundry or something.

Seven years ago,  in the Hope train depot (turned visitor's center)  I met a biker named Mike who lives in a barn in Georgia.  His hair in a ponytail, he was wearing overalls;  I was wearing the incomparable air of road freedom.  Nothing on that road trip felt "normal"--everything was road trip crazy, free, daring, and good.  We rode through the Great Smokey Mountains on the Harley, stopped and danced roadside, poked around antique stores.

The map of meeting Mike would go from Hope to Gatlinburg to Beale Street in Memphis where we listened to the blues.  A few days later,  I'd go north to Virginia, Cape Cod and Maine, wending through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Mike south to Georgia where he was building his barn.  (He would send me a cell phone and we'd talk every day for two months.)

Then, after the leaf-extravaganza was over, I drove to  Georgia to see Mike and to celebrate Thanksgiving with Carlene and my kids and two grandsons.  Mike made Thanksgiving dinner for my family, even had  a petting zoo in his back yard for Jackson and Marcus. On that day, dancing to a song called "In Spite of Ourselves," I thought we were Forever.

I stayed from November to February, then drove home to Texas.  In March, I drove back to Georgia for two more months.

When we packed the Mini the last time, we both knew it was the last.  We stood in his driveway, both crying.  " You're the love of my life," one of us said.  I drove home to San Antonio, sad to the bone.

I resumed writing groups and started new ones, and I felt (and still feel) that this life and this work and my Texas friends all add up to Home.

But....

Isn't there always a "but" in every journey story?

...After seven years, we saw each other again on this last trip to Georgia.  All the reasons we went our separate ways are still there, including--This is my home; Brown Mule Farm is his. But as we all know, love--however weird or improbable it may seem to onlookers--brings out parts of ourselves that don't come out to play in most places.

Two weeks ago, when Mike and I drove to one of his favorite antique barns and had lunch in Athens, those parts I thought were safely packed up and wrapped in plastic came out again, just for a visit.

We're not riding off into the sunset together into Happily Ever Afterwards. But we've laughed again at things nobody else would find funny, and we've disagreed about the same things we always disagreed about. A week ago, we talked on the phone as I was driving through Louisiana and remembered how much fun we'd had dancing to  Cajun music there.

How can I draw all this for Sketchbook Skool homework?  How do you draw a rear-view mirror and keep it real? What kind of inks do you need to draw the thin curvy backroads as seen from the back of a Harley?

Being with Mike reminded us both of where our journey together began--and the euphoria of falling in love, two crazy strangers, in a town called Hope.