Sunlight Therapy

On the porch we gather – old friends and new, sages and comedians – no more than one degree of separation woven into the fabric of our town.  “The Retired Teachers Brigade” meets each Thursday after four o’clock, in the sunlight, on the porch.  Real life with patina.

We pour words of truth  –  revealing the interior spaces of our lives –  then  drink another glass of wine.  Oh, there is little that gives comfort, like a session of porch therapy.

I first moved here as a student –  in recovery from an earlier life.  With degrees and a job in hand, I left, and then returned.   I married and spent decades of domestic life in this prairie town.  Now I’m back again.  This is my womb.  

Real life.

I barely spoke to, or saw anyone;  a rare zoom call when necessary for the covid years.  I read fiction and current events.  I tried to reconstruct and understand what I had done –  would I ever heal again. How?

I seldom phoned my mother while she was ailing in assisted living – and I felt worse for it.  I knew she worried about me.  She was right to, but I couldn’t console her.  I could not speak of my anguish – especially not with my mother.  In the end, I resolved that I must return to this place on the prairie – the womb.  

I had just bought my house with the wrap-around porch after a monumental move just a few years earlier –  from the coast to Minneapolis  – as if moving was easy for me.  It wasn’t.  It was necessary.  

Not long after, I brought Mom for a visit. “I see this is a nice, little house for you,” she said that day, a month before she died.  Mom knew.

I hired workers now, for renovations.  I still had no internet service.  The public library was only a few blocks away.  I biked off, to take care of email, and the everyday.  That’s when I ran into him.  

He was an old friend, really by now, an acquaintance only.  He had morphed into so many things  – professional, money oriented things  – since we were students.  George was his name.  He was on the public library board.  It was board meeting day.  

He was surprised to see me.  I was surprised he recognized me.  We briefly said hello.  I explained I had bought a house.  He wanted to get together.  I could do that, but not this trip.  I would be back again. We said good-bye.  He contacted me a few weeks later via fb.  I invited him to visit me the next time I was in town –  to see the project I was working on. 

George came promptly the day we agreed to.  My renovation crew was working.  He and I sat on the porch.   I offered him a drink – wine or beer – something to accompany conversation.  We talked and laughed for a couple hours – in the sunlight.   He had political sophistication  –  like always – but not cynical, like I remembered him. 

I’d had no political orientation decades earlier, when we first met, in graduate school.  Then, I was a default, prairie, Republican.  George changed that for me – however unintentional it might have been – he introduced me that summer to my future husband, his political science professor.

George, just like me, had moved in and out of this town, a few times over the decades.  He was back, and had a big house on the river bluff.  Why not?  He probably enjoyed nice pensions  –  through VP appointments in academia  –  and had created his own piece of stature, well-being  and comfort.  We talked, but oh, how we laughed that afternoon.  He wanted to visit again.

Two days later he came.  That’s when he asked me the question,  “Why did you move to Minneapolis anyway?”  He  knew my husband –  why had I left John, George wanted to know.

It hit so unexpectedly  –  his question.   I answered candidly,  exposing  the most delicate pieces of my heart to his scrutiny.  His jaw dropped at my answer.  Why had I moved to MSP?  

Sunlight Therapy:

“My first love found me five years ago on fb.  In high school, when I was sixteen  – and so was he – I got pregnant. We were separated then, by our parents.  I was sent away, and gave our baby up for adoption.” 

He stared at me.  I looked different to him now.   I continued – wanting him to see too, that it was not an ordinary affair.

“We secretly saw each other for two years after that.  We went away to separate colleges after high school. Eventually we submitted to our parents wishes – we broke up.  He married and divorced, married again, and became an MD.  

He said our reuniting was the most remarkable event of his life; I was his thoughts, dreams, world, his light. It was magnetic for us – being together again.  Though we both were married, he compelled me to move to MSP.  I left John.  It was magical, passionate love for three years. Abruptly he said good-bye, “I cannot hurt my wife.”  

That was it.  

Everything now, for me, was therapy:  crying therapy, dirt therapy, journaling, yoga.  Porch therapy – Sunlight therapy.

Afterwards I thought how much fun it had been with George – to laugh at what we once were – and he must have thought so, too.  It struck me how my story surprised him.  He hadn’t known when he first knew me, that I’d had so much raw, life experience, he said.  Perhaps he once had a romantic interest in me.  He never said so, but there were hints.  He recalled that he had taken me to the lake – which I didn’t remember – and described me in my bathing suit. 

I became a muse for him, I think.  He is a writer.  I remembered the shock his face betrayed when I first told him about my life at sixteen, and then at sixty-five.  He texted me shortly after he left that day, “I miss you already.” 

Sunlight therapy on the porch.