5 Minute Friday: Tree

Linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker today for her 5-minute writing exercise (focused writing on one word for 5 minutes, no edits or concern for proper punctuation necessary, just honest raw, writing).  The theme this week is tree:

When we were dating we often found ourselves ending our time together at a local lake.  We'd finish up doing the fun things or the errands or being silly or having great conversations and then we'd stroll about the lake until we stopped strolling and parked ourselves under our tree.

It was under that tree we had our first snuggle.  I sat leaned into him and we shared our hopes and dreams.  We talked about family and life goals and what we wanted to feel about how we'd lived life when we were 80.

And then, after 9 months of dating and talking and sharing and living and being so swept up in the so-in-love-you-can-barely-breathe magic, he took me back to our tree and got down on one knee and asked me to live out our dreams with him forever.

Of course I said yes.  And I kissed him there under our tree.

We came back every now and then when we'd walk the lake early in our marriage, but then we moved to a new city.  We hardly go back now.  It's been years since we've seen that tree.

Although that is somewhat sad in certain ways… the not seeing something that was once so important… we now have more.  We have a living tree.  It's routed in us and in this marriage.  The roots twist and link and grow from our lives spent together these last 6 years.  From the fights and the stand offs and hurt feelings and the pain of loss or hurt and the best moments and the worst moments and the beauty in creating new life together and the compromise and the falling deeper in to love because you are unfolding the depths of the others soul and having a lot of fun in the through thick and through thin…

And the new tree has spouted and branches they are forming.  This son.  That son.  Our home.  Our life.  Our pain.  Our joy.  Our failures.  Our success.  Our family.  We are one at the roots of that tree (we are the seed) and coming from us isn't something so stoic and tangible like the tree by the lake we sat under that first time, but it is real and has soul and life and it is ours.