Missing Marc

Marc left this morning for Quebec City. He'll be there a week, working. Well, not really a week, more like four or five days. But it will feel like a week. Or more.

We've known that he was going for a while. He'll be replacing a roof for a dear friend of his, Olivier. We need the money, Marc and Olivier need the time together, and I am just fine here by myself. Just. Fine.

No, really, I am just fine. I haven't missed the blessing in that, either. I have actually never been this "fine" in my life. Secure. Loved. Content. Peaceful. But today I am sad.

When Marc drove away, after leaving ample instructions on things like which newly planted trees not to run over when I mow the lawn this week, I stood in the lane in my nightgown and stared after the car for several minutes. I was holding an egg. There is a nest of eggs in the ditch beside the lane, and Marc had found a fresh egg in it. He had handed it to me as he got into the car, while I promised to remove the eggs so the hens will stop laying in the ditch and return to their nest boxes. I took my egg and went to sit on the front steps. Then, rolling the amazingly perfect, smooth egg around in my hand, I cried. I am really going to miss Marc this week. I thought about how the Bible says that as a married couple, we are "one flesh". I wondered if there was ever a time that the "one flesh" thing is more apparent than when we are separated like this. When we are apart, we each live with a sometimes vague, sometimes more acute sense of incompleteness. It's not a personhood kind of thing - we are both very individual individuals. We are whole in and of ourselves, or at least more whole than we have ever been in our lives and growing in wholeness all the time. Still, right now there is something missing and I know that that missing piece is on his way to Quebec city. He has my blessings, he has my love and prayers, and I know that he is feeling exactly the same way as I am.

So, I sat on the steps and cried. Then I heard a car barreling up the lane. He had forgotten the address and phone number of where he was going. I wiped my tears, not wanting to make his leaving any harder on him than it already was. He went inside and collected the info that he needed, came back out and kissed me, asking me if it was okay if he stayed home to which I replied in the affirmative, laughed at one of the chicks pecking dead bugs off of the front bumper of his car, got in the car and left again. I was not the only one who had been in tears. I cried again.

Then I yelled at the rooster, who was tormenting a flock of about 15 young chickens on the front lawn. He headed off with two of his hens into the front field, where apparently all the good bugs reside. The flock of young'uns scurried off towards their coop en masse, cheeping and fretting all the way. One of the young chicks, a lovely white rooster, quite precociously tried to crow and sounded ever so much like he was crowing through a kazoo. I laugh out loud every time he does this. In the dappled sunlight, the kittens collided in a exuberant chest-bump that left them tangled together and winded on the soft green lawn. Mini, the dog, sat in front of the garage and stared mournfully down the lane at the dust of Marc's departure. Robin, a fledgling robin that we rescued from one of the kittens and are in the process of releasing back into the wild, fluttered past my head to the scaffolding by the house where his little food dish sits. He landed near it, and impatiently announced that it was empty, with cunning hops and chirps. The releasing Robin into the wild thing is obviously moving slowly. Pippin the bunny sat quietly beside me on the step, perhaps in support but probably just waiting to be fed.

My tears dried and the hollow feeling settled into my stomach. It was going to be there for a while. Four or five days. And in the meantime, there are hungry mouths to be fed, lawns to be mowed, poop to be scooped, roads to be traveled, people to be loved, books to be read, and a life to be led.

Is it Friday yet?