Date Night

They’re always better when you don’t have any expectations going in. And it wasn’t an auspicious start, with Alex tearing after me wailing as I went out the door. How do you explain to a three-year-old that Mommy and Daddy will be more fun to be around if they get some time together, time to relax and be friends and lovers?

We drove to the opposite end of town and beyond, out into the country south on Providence Road, chasing a Katy Trail access that we haven’t visited in so long that we never did find it. Instead, we ended up at Cooper’s Landing, which looked enormously different than we remembered. Eventually we remembered that the owner had picked up his two-story building and moved it upriver, so it wasn’t that our memories were faulty; it actually was different. A lot busier, a lot noisier. We walked away from the campground, and set up a picnic blanket on the weedy gravel berm separating the road from the river. There we stayed for an hour, eating our picnic dinner and watching the sunset.

The colors on the Missouri River were like nothing I remember seeing before. I can put on paper that the sun shot an orange-yellow arrow across the river toward us; I can write that to the north, the water swirled in streaky patches of orchid and more shades of blue than I can name—one so pale that it was barely blue, another a dark, vivid royal. The colors on the water changed, deepened, molded and melded. But all of that can’t really communicate what it looked like. I understand now how artists can paint the same scene over and over. To us it looks like multiple pictures of the same scene. But to someone whose eye is trained to color, it must be fulfilling to use a completely different color palate to create the same landscape. I desperately wanted the camera, but unfortunately, between me dropping it off the tram at the Arboretum in Chicago and Christian trying to fix it, we now have no camera. So it lives only in memory. And perhaps it’s better that way.

At last we picked up and walked back to the truck. We decided to re-orient ourselves, so we went driving, looking for Easley, where Cooper’s Landing used to be. And we found it. There is a cave up on the bluff at Easley, which they closed several years ago—placed a boulder across the trail and fenced the entrance, I don’t remember why (vandalism? Bats?). It was amazing to see how quickly nature can obliterate the signs of human presence. That stretch of river bluff has always been overgrown, but we’re not sure we ever saw the cave last night. And the trail is almost indistinguishable now. Someone’s still using it—there’s about a foot-wide bare strip—but it’s definitely returned to the wild. We realized we haven’t been to Easley at least since we’ve been married.

When we got home last night, the kids were asleep. I got Julianna up to nurse. Afterwards, I snuggled with her. She was half asleep, her eyes opening and closing at lazy intervals, and she would give me this silly smile. When I put her down in her crib again, there was no protest. She just conked back out instantly. Then I went into Alex’s room and found him drenched in sweat and curled up in a ball with his face pressed against the ship wheel head board, with every animal he owns wedged against his body.

Ah, life is good.