My wife Beret is up and walking after back surgery last Thursday.  Our wedding vows in 1987 featured an allusion to Rilke, about a married couple growing like trees, parallel but apart, so “that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”   But 27 years on, I find us growing more like the mesquite and prickly pear in my cousin Morris’ beautiful painting below.  Not that our entanglements are quite so visible above ground.   This summer’s bilateral health challenges have prompted each of us to grant the other new space, giving the person whose body it is the choice of how much pain to push through, or how much vertigo to court.   Our intertwining runs deeper, in the roots, where a shock to one flows straight into the sap of the other.  Beret’s lumbar disc blew out one day after my major seizure in June.  And my biggest seizure since then rolled like a thundershower into her hospital room the same afternoon her disc shrapnel was removed (I know – it’s all about ME!).

What I like best about Morris’ painting is that, at a certain point, there is no individual “self” at all – just a tangle of cactus pears and limbs of mesquite anchored to a rock (no doubt sheltering a nest of armadillos or rattlesnakes underneath).  And so, really, no “death” at all, unless somebody comes along with a dozer to gouge the whole thing out; and even then, our roots will save us.