A
Love Like Ours
~Mitzi Boydell~
What
do you say about a love like ours?...other than it took 25 years to get
it together. I was a Senior in high school when I fell for Joe,
he was already a Navy man. I say we were engaged, I remember the
conversation! He doesn’t remember it that way...
Nonetheless,
we had a big fight and broke up the night before he left for his first
tour. Stupid, now. Stupid, then, but who knew? If only I’d
had the slightest understanding what he was experiencing.
 
We wrote
for a while, then a year later he showed up at my door. I saw him
that one night, said he was moving on to California to get married.
Didn’t see him again for 25 years! I never forgot him, though. His
mom lived in Phoenix, dad lived in California, same with me and I looked
for him both places, especially in California when I went to my dad’s.
In fact,
I never quit looking and every time I’d run into a certain old friend
I always asked...but the answer was always the same until 1991.
He’d run into Joe’s sister at a baseball game and told me where she lived.
It took a while but I found her, and then found him. I heard the
silence in response that day as I said on the phone, “this is a voice
from your past, my name is Mitzi, do you remember me”? It was deafening
as I waited for him to confirm he didn’t remember me. So I was stunned
to hear him finally say “Mitzi Brodie?...Shit!, how’d you find me?”
It
was two more years before he made it to Arizona and I picked him up at
the airport. Scared half to death...stunned again when he picked
me out of the crowd as if someone was whispering in his ear.
He
stayed for a weekend, he was in transit between California and northern
Arizona. Emotional and tearful, we parted again three days later
and I voiced that I didn’t want it to be another 25 years before I saw
him again. It was two weeks. Then weekly as we commuted and
incurred astronomical phone bills in between. He came back to Phoenix
two months later and stayed.
And...here,
it truly begins...and continues... He’s still the precious man I
fell in love with so many years ago...clouded by a now-thirty-year-old
experience that left him forever changed. And, everything before
and in between that makes us all who we are on any given day.
I savor
the good times...and then, when...I savor the good times. It seems
this “gypsy woman” (his words) who scared him away so many years ago was,
after all, just what the “Doc” ordered...but he never has taken his own
medicine well...!
We live
life perched on the side of a hill in what we call the “good” Arizona
Territory, in the shadows of yet another Charlie Ridge. Cornville,
where there’s no corn, a misnomer created by a governmental typo on a
post office application. Was supposed to be Cohnville. Simple
folks, rural lifestyle, animals abound, human and otherwise.
With
us are our two teenage sons, whom we “spirited” away from their past city
lives, to share this mesquite grove. (“No concrete! Where do we
skateboard?!“) They’ve learned to build heavy duty bikes, designed
to catch “major air” and as long as they’re riding, the east third of
this acre will remain painstakingly sculpted into the way coolest bike
track of the moment.
 
Keith
and Joey
“Stars
shining bright above you,
night breezes seem to whisper I love you,
birds singing in the sycamore (mesquite!) tree,
Dream A Little Dream...
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