Valentines and ashes: A memory and a blessing.
When I fell in love with the man who would become my partner in life, I was struck by a vision that was as unsettling as it was profound: a glimpse of myself standing at his graveside.
Dear fellow traveler,
One might expect a flurry of joyous moments and dreams of a shared future when falling in love. Yet, I strangely had this vision of death and ashes that both frightened me and affirmed the love I was about to embrace.
I was warming up in the car after a frozen winter walk from Gooseberry Falls to the tectonic plates of ice on Lake Superior. We had ventured far north from the settled plains, a journey that Americans seem to treat as a mere day trip, while we Germans would reserve such distances for extended vacations. As we sat in the silence of the car, the memory of the falls' frozen cascade lingered, a testament to nature's quiet endurance. It was there, in the contrast between the bright glance of sun on ice and the stillness of the car, that the vision came to me—uninvited and transformative.
But let me start from the beginning:
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