I remember the year Martha said she didn’t love me any more. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the landscape around us, and in which we live, reminds us to love one another. But that year that Martha flat out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one. I suppose in their own way, each year is tough, just as each of them is beautiful, but we didn’t know what to do about that one.

You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates —it either gets stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.

It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her— them —go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me any more.

But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.

A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.