Caring for Marriage

You've been given a year. It's called 2008 and it stretches out in front of you like a virgin snowfall, waiting to be explored. Soon there will be trails of footsteps, some bold with far apart prints, others halting, retraced or abruptly changing direction. Some will show groups of footprints all tangled together in varying sizes. The silent stories chronicle times traveled with others, with all the blessings and bothers that entails. They also mark the solitary steps, perhaps with the dimple left by a walking stick, visually changing the rhythm from a two step to a waltz.   A year can feel like a vast expanse in which to cover ground. Or, looking back over your shoulder, last year's steps can look rather paltry, hardly visible in the shadows and valleys, disappearing beneath the forces of wind, water and time. Time is an elusive barometer of accomplishment. Kipling beckons us to "Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run". Certainly  twelve months would afford us an impressive distance indeed, were we in the business of moving off road vehicles or a pair of LA Gears. But what if we are more interested in transporting a house, or a relationship? How much time does it take to forgive an old grudge, or to launch a dream? One of my gifts this Christmas was to forego criticism of my husband for a year. Will there be any visible footsteps to show the progress I have made when I turn around next December and survey where I have come? Perhaps it will feel like I have traveled at the speed of continental drift. No doubt it will have been an expensive present, costing me dearly as the plates of my rocky soul build up pressure beneath the surface. But sometimes, after centuries of silence, those land masses shift to create whole new formations, losing old ones beneath the foam. Dare I hope that after 365 days of swallowed comments, there might erupt in me a mountain on whose pinnacle I might stand? Could it be that having never moved a foot I may have gained a thousand?