“I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.”  – Willa Cather, My Antonia.

In the morning, I love to see Maria, always the artist in her layers and scarves and hats and leggings and beads, carrying the manure from the barn out, often in her wedding dress. Maria, like an actor is never out of character, no matter what she is doing.

The manure pile is something she has taken on, all of her own. I help her shovel, but she always carries the manure to the pile, and I always watch and give thanks for her. I will admit, I often think as I age and lose my hair and my knees hurt when I bend, that she will one day look at me in horror, and ask “what have I done?”

But I am beginning to understand that will not happen, she sees right through all of that nonsense and right into my soul, and if she ever does walk away, it will be because the fire went out of me, flickered and died.

I’ve been with Maria for a decade now, and some people lose things as they grow older, but her inner glow has never faded. Whatever else comes and goes, Maria, like Willa Cather’s Antonia, has never lost the fire of life. She never becomes jaded, or cynical, she never loses her curiosity, her wonder at the world, her generosity of spirit.

She is never too busy to listen to a bird, or love a tree,  bring a treat to a chicken,  love a rock she found, to flash a radiant and dazzling smile, or rush to help a friend. I sometimes think Maria was Antonia in another life:

“But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things,” wrote Cather.

“She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races. ”

Last night, i went online to re-read a chapter of “My Antonia,” it is such a beautiful book, and one of the reasons i always call Maria my Willa Cather Girl:

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”

Antonia could be moody, even brooding, but she was always happy.

Perhaps we all feel like that as we grow older and then when we die and become a part of something entirely different, whether it is the sun or the air. Perhaps, as Cather wrote, that is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. I think Maria is happy in that way.

And that, I think, is the gift of  loving someone like this, you never lose the fire of life either, it just burns too brightly.