Fifty Years

I open the trunk I’d always called Grampie’s trunk. It used to sit at the head of the stairs in my childhood home. I lift the top tray, heavy with Bibles of people long gone. I am the keeper of these things, things like my mother’s photo albums from her college days, her father’s papers from the war, an ancient Methodist hymn book, complete with a clasp to keep it closed, and an inscription inside that it belonged to my father. “Please return.”

Most of what is in the trunk is not what was there when I was a child. There’s still the stencil used to paint my great-grandfather’s name, a blanket woven from the wool of sheep that wandered these fields well over a hundred years ago, tiny shoes from a precious baby who died in 1918, and a silver plaque, engraved with the death date of my grandfather’s sister, after a botched abortion in 1917. Pieces of lives. Photos of faces I miss, as well as those I wish were not a part of my family history.

At some point I’d tucked in mementos of my own for safe keeping – my Gideon New Testament, autograph books from school and summer camp, the tiny pink sleepers my premature daughter wore to come home from the hospital, so small a size, but far too big for her little body.

None of these were the artifacts I was looking for. I looked in other corners and storage spaces, and finally decided they were gone, the letters he wrote me fifty years ago. Today would be our fiftieth wedding anniversary. I wanted to ritualize this day, but without the letters, how?

This morning I sat with my coffee and that question in the early dawn light. And then I knew. I could do an astrological chart for our wedding date. I really don’t know the right way to do that, so I pretend our marriage was born on September 11, 1976, at 2 in the afternoon, in this place where I still live. I don’t know what a true astrologer would say, but I was struck by the shapes in the chart, and the meanings of the placements.

Ours was a marriage that valued relationship, begun in optimism with an expectation of perfection. We were idealistic and religious, with a vision that touched on missionary zeal. But we were deceiving ourselves, confused about our motivations.

The chart has a powerful yod, or Finger of God, and a massive Talent Triangle, with a four planet stellium. With four planets at the top of the triangle, it is like four Talent Triangles stacked on top of each other. Talent Triangles represent significant advantages, but they can lead to complacency, if the potential is not developed through hard work.

This marriage had the potential to turn dreams into reality. It felt like it held a karmic mission and purpose. But this would require letting go of safety and comfort. There was a misalignment between that sense of safety and the ideals we held. So much possibility, but the powerful yod meant we would need to pivot away from safety toward transformation. As I look at this chart, I wonder at how that marriage set me up for my own personal transformation. I had to let go of my own safety and comfort in order to become who I am becoming today.

I took a printed copy of this chart out to the compost pile, and lit it on fire. I watched as it burned. The ashes and charred paper will become part of the soil – fifty years of my life, composting.