I love getting to see my beautiful wife

I love to see my beautiful wife peacefully asleep. It's such a confusing thing to see a tiny tornado at rest. It makes me want to gently pat her sleeping cheek just to feel the warmth against my skin. Sometimes she will sigh which breaks my heart over and over. The love that is never contained and never stops growing fills my chest in waves while she just dreams her fitful dreams.

My new schedule means that I get to actually date my wife again. Though there is still too little precious time we can spend together, the hours we get contain more daylight. It's also remarkable to see this tiny little tornado of a woman express every kind of gentleness, kindness, playfulness and love when we are together. I think that one of the things I like so much about Satu is that she inhabits the world in a genuine way. She makes time to go outside with me to experience the magical light of a sunset. Still, after ten years together, my heart jumps when she looks me in the eyes.

Seeing Satu during the day means that I get to learn things about her too like how she restored the red color to the bowl of one of her pipes mixing in just the right amount of ash. She speaks fluent crow, which I knew, but she also speaks squirrl, deer and opossum, which is new information to me.

Lately we have been watching a very loooooooooong series of  British detective stories. The episodes are long and slow and meander over WW2 English towns and people at a very leisurely pace. I don't have the patience for it, but it's comforting in the way that shadows on the ceiling comfort you when you shouldn't be awake. It makes the home feel homey and gives us good reason to sit together.

Satu worries about getting older and seeing her lifetime stretch out into the past, but I think that we are in our best season yet. I feel loved in my home and happy with our lives together. That has always been my understanding of success because I grew up with people who weren't struggling to identify with their work or their names in the world. The world is just the stretching landscape where you make a very small, happy story. I know Satu sees it differently, she wants to be seen in the world for what she knows she does well, I just want to be seen by her.

I hope that as we roll into season 11 of our own long, meandering American lives she will be able to experience bringing her work into the world. I'd just as happily sit with her in the studio while she works if it means bringing more fullness to her world.