That’s the irony.

            People have often called us an odd couple: me, the lover and manipulator of words, married to a man who, for many years, was considered tongue-tied.

            That said, I must confess: the most profound words ever written to me came at the height of despair by my farming/ranching, slow-talking husband, a recovering alcoholic.

            This was not a love letter in the traditional sense. Indeed, during our courtship almost twenty years earlier, he had written only six letters while we were separated over a summer. Terse, filled with little more than hi, how are you, he was simply not a man given to speaking or writing what was in his heart.

            Through the tumultuous early years of our marriage, however, I wrote hundreds of letters to him, begging him to think, begging him to feel, weeping over the pain our children and family were enmeshed in as a result of his drinking. Instead of moving him, though, my endless chatter only clattered to the bottom of the black pit we’d fallen into.

            Not knowing what else to do, I stopped talking, or—more precisely—found myself withholding the callous words that only added to the chaos around us. But, whether it was as a result of the silence or the silent prayers I prayed—or perhaps both—suddenly we began moving in a new direction.

            My husband wanted help, and, facing his own fears, agreed to enter a recovery center.

            One of the assignments given to him during the first week of recovery was to write. For a man who could hardly wrap his weather-beaten hand around a pencil, this was a monumental task. According to him, he spent hours looking at the blank pages of his journal. What was he supposed to write about? What was it he felt?       Most of all, he wondered, would his words convey the despair in his own heart or the regret that overwhelmed him? Could they really make a difference?

            As he spelled out his questions and shared the conflicts with which he struggled, he slowly found the words. He wrote about a dozen pages in all, which, by a writer’s standard, were hardly the introduction to a small body of work. For him, the pages constituted a major opus.

            When he handed his journal to me, as required by the counselor, during the final week of the program, he was almost shaking.

            I remember sitting there in the bare, cold conference room of the recovery center. At this point, I was filled with more questions than answers as to our future or joint recovery.  Chills ran up and down my back and I couldn’t speak.

            He anxiously apologized for the sloppy writing and squirmed as I opened to the first page. Then he seemed to hold his breath, a question in his glance.

            Could he trust me with his confession?

            I studied the tight, labored scrawl and instantly recognized the price my husband had paid for this sober examination of the bitterness and confusion he’d carried for so long. The first page represented little more than scattered, random thoughts, but by the second and third page, his words were filled with an intensity and clarity I’d never experienced in our life before this. I read, and reread, his heart-felt yearning and my own heart broke open in response.

            Miraculously, my husband’s words not only touched me, they transformed me.

            And in that moment, I fell in love all over again.

Contact Gail at gfiorini@sisqtel.net to compliment her on this touching piece.