I am back in Flemington NJ. I left home when I was 31 to come here and live with my boyfriend. I think they thought I would never leave. And I never really wanted to leave. They were right about that. I liked being a child. I liked that I could always got to my mom’s house when I was sick. Or that I could always knock on my dad’s door for pasta at midnight after a wild night out…
No. I wasn’t looking for a mate. I was happy with a boyfriend.
But life, as we all know, has a funny way of working out. I ended up moving to Flemington and probably cried every day for the first month or so. Heh. And I was 31 years old…
A few years later, when my boyfriend asked me to marry him (in front of my family on Thanksgiving Eve), I was the only one surprised. As it turned out, he told EVERYBODY he was planning this…
So, at 34, I walked down the aisle to the score from Lonesome Dove escorted by my parents. The room was filled with 82 people we both loved and who were involved, for real, in our lives. It was as if my whole life was in that room on that Saturday night.
It’s 19 years later. My mom and both his parents, and our dogs Sam and Bear… all gone. We’re almost divorced and all the infrastructure of our lives together is all gone. The condo was sold. All the furniture dispersed and sold. All the things we surrounded ourselves with, mostly gone.