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But I have not yet said anything about the first time C. took me back to her childhood home. This was during the autumn after we met, some months after we got that flat tire on the way to Ohio. We left the Hudson Valley late one afternoon and drove south, on roads that grew progressively smaller the closer we got to our destination. By the time we crossed the county line, night had fallen. The crickets were so loud we could hear them from inside the car. I leaned forward in my seat to look up at the sky, as dense with stars as if a box full of the universe had tipped and spilled out overhead. Below them, the occasional stand of trees formed a patch of darker darkness, marking the meandering path of a creek or a windbreak at the edge of a field. Other than that, the land stretched out unbroken all around us, an enormous coastal plain that, sixty miles farther east, surrendered to the sea.
Later, after I moved in with C., I would come to know those roads by day, the crops speeding past on both sides, their even furrows making a kind of stop-motion photography. And I would watch them fly past, too, with the seasons, wheat giving way to soybeans, soybeans to sorghum, sorghum to field corn that, by August, stands so tall you can’t see around the corner at intersections. Now and again silos rise up in the distance. At the junctions where dirt roads meet paved ones, honor-system farm stands advertise fresh tomatoes and homemade jam and hot peppers and peaches. On dark winter mornings, the shorn fields crunch underfoot with frost and fog hovers just above the ground, like a blanket if something had spirited away the bed beneath it.
Tidewater Maryland, they call it, and it’s true: all that farmland is always just inches away from becoming marshland. In heavy rains, the crops rise up from low temporary lakes and serene little wood ducks paddle across the fields atop their own reflections. To the east, the gray Atlantic heaves and booms. To the west, the half-salt, half-sweet waters of the bay lap steadily away at the delicate lacework of the coastline. In between, a dozen and more rivers divvy up the land—the Pocomoke, the Nanticoke, the Miles, the Wye, the Wicomico, the Sassafras, the Choptank, the Little Choptank, the Tred Avon, too many others to name. The tributaries that flow out of them are said to number close to ten thousand.
Loss diminishes the world; finding makes it richer, more abundant, more interesting. Since C. and I met, I have fallen in love, also, with the wind-tossed, high-gloss green of winter wheat—to my mind, the most beautiful shade of green on a planet full of beautiful shades of green. I have stood by the side of a field and watched hundreds of snow geese take flight, as if departing our mortal world for their own enchanted kingdom. I have moved to a part of the country I’d never heard of before and, leaning into the wind on afternoon runs where the air rolls across the unobstructed land with the force of the sea, felt an exhilaration as pure as any I’ve felt on top of a mountain. I have grown close to C.’s parents and sisters and extended family, gone to church with them on Easter morning and tucked presents under their tree for Christmas Day. I have found a home as wonderful as the one into which I was born, and as impossible to imagine beforehand.
In one of my favorite passages ever written about love, James Baldwin asks his readers to imagine that they are from Chicago, know nothing about the island of Hong Kong, and have no desire at all to visit it. Now, he writes, “pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life.” He goes on:
If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlanes, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
I would go even further and say that the moment you meet your beloved, the battle with space and time has already been won. C. is not from Hong Kong, and I am not from Chicago. Still, we were born far enough apart in time and lived far enough apart in space to make it feel improbable that the two of us, each wholly free to fall in love with the other, each mysteriously and powerfully inclined to do so, should have met on Main Street that lovely spring day—“neither an inch nor half a globe too far,” as the poet Wis?awa Szymborska once wrote, “neither a minute nor aeons too early.”
To what convulsion, to what accident, do we owe that encounter? For those, like C., who believe in God, or in a universe otherwise ordered in part by watchful and benevolent forces, such meetings, like all wonderful finds, have a straightforward explanation: they are blessings, godsends, miracles. The lover and the beloved were meant for each other—indeed, in a very literal sense, made for each other—and their encounter was never not going to happen. In that vein, you sometimes hear couples say that they were destined to meet. But among those of us without that faith, and perhaps even among some of the devout as well, I suspect that the opposite feeling is at least as common: a kind of amazed gratitude, given the wild contingency of life, that such an unlikely thing could ever come to pass. That is how I feel: that finding one’s beloved is an “Astonishment,” to borrow the title of that Szymborska poem, because, cosmically speaking, there is so much time and space in which not to do so.
Never have I felt this more strongly than on that first visit with C. to the Eastern Shore. The closer we got to her hometown, the more unlikely it started to seem that we had ever met. Other than a trip to Baltimore in my teens, I had never been to Maryland before, knew almost nothing about it, and had only belatedly learned that part of it was out on a peninsula, removed from the rest; when C. first told me where she lived, I had struggled to place the region on a map. Now, driving through it, I did not find it any easier to process our location. It seemed impossible that Washington, D.C., was only ninety minutes away; the place we were in felt as remote from the nation’s capital as Nebraska.