Dawn - Part I

She’s given me the afternoon to write, which is to say that she is entertaining the kids, isn’t yelling at me about drinking wine before 5, and is resisting the urge to come in here every quarter hour on the quarter hour. She’s doing a really good job with all except the last. She’s just told me that she may can stay away if I will regularly check my email so she chat with me from the other computer in the den. Our friend Spencer finds this disgusting. I’m pretty sure it’s because her husband (yuck!) is yucky.

I’ve spent the last little bit reading some other lesbian blogs. After reading all the love stories out there, it occurred to me that I haven’t written much about Dawn that doesn’t involve our kids. So here’s an installment of True-as-Far-as-I-Know-It Dawn Lore.

It seems logical to start at her childhood home. She grew up in North Dakota, for the love of God. North Dakota! Before I met her I wasn’t totally convinced that North Dakota even existed. I could have been persuaded that it was simply a joke amongst cartographers. On her tongue, North Dakota is a Wonderland, a frozen tundra with only 25 different species of tree and endless adventure opportunities. She paints it as Norman Rockwell would. She loves the small town. She loves telling about her mother taping 42 cents to a letter and her postman buying the stamp for her. She loves that when her mother accidentally called the dentist’s office to warn them that Dawn’s father had had a stroke and she was bringing him in, the dentist called the ER and said, “Something’s happened to Ed! Maggie’s bringing him in! Meet them out front, will you?” She was a really big fish in a very small pond, but remembers splashing contentedly and regrets not getting her kids there more often.

Dawn went to South America as an exchange student in High School. She didn’t speak a word of Portuguese or Spanish when she applied or when she arrived in Sao Paolo. She had never seen the ocean, either. I think that heaven will be a time-machine. I will, at will zip through time and space witnessing historical events, big and small. At the very top of my list, will be a statuesque fingertip appointment in Washington in August and a Grassy Knoll in Dallas in November, both in 1963. I’ll see my own birth and my own firsts. But before I go anywhere else, I will take a moonlit trip to Brasil to see her see the sea.

Her soul picked her body up from the drowning pool of blood her attackers created and left her in. Her soul, perfect and remarkably still aglow, carried her broken exterior to doctors good enough to just keep her alive. She forgave them years ago, and helps me forgive them now. Stronger and Better than even she was then, she now is near unstoppable in spirit and body. Damn inspiring is what she is! Amazing and beautiful and her own and still Mine! Mine! I’m not getting over this miracle any time soon.

More Dawn Lore to follow. Stay tuned.