To Love, Honor and Cheer

There was no posting on Nightly Tea yesterday.  I was not near a computer.  Indeed, I was not even near an internet signal, nor the range of a cell-phone tower.  I stood in the rain and the dense fog, waiting for my beloved to emerge through the mist at a finish line, the ending of a 102 mile cycling journey that scaled 9000 feet of elevation gain.  Yesterday, my husband and his brother Doug rode their bicycles uphill on this epic ride with about 400 other crazies through stinging rain and clouds so low they touched the earth.  For part of his journey, I waited under a red and black umbrella on the side of the road with my sister-in-law Cathy, rain running in little streams around the edge of our tiny refuge, its colors like a lighthouse to those who trudged by on two weary wheels.  Riders suddenly appeared out of a grey nothingness not more than twenty feet from where we stood, coming quickly into view and disappearing past us, like waking in the early morning light, the rough edges of a dream remembered and then forgotten.

Bill came into my life so many years ago “out of a clear blue sky,” to whisk me off my feet and marry me.  Yesterday, there was a foggy grey road before me, an indistinguishable shadow, and then not twenty feet away, a familiar jersey, and I knew it was him.  He needed one more bottle of Gatorade, a small packet of gooey energy stuff, and a good word.  “You’re doing it,” was all the time I had before he was off again, surging up the mountain, disappearing into the mist with sixteen uphill miles to go.

I jumped in the truck and headed for the finish line, hoping to beat him to it.  The road careened through unfamiliar terrain, and I hoped that I was going the right way through the foggy mountain wilderness.  I parked the truck in a field and took a shuttle bus to the top of Grandfather Mountain.  The last two miles were so steep that the bus gears groaned with the strain and cyclists had to weave back and forth across the road just to stay upright.  The fog was so dense that one could see the droplets in the air, the visibility so low that Bill said, he could hear the crowds but had no conception of how far away they were.  When he finally emerged out of the fog, the finish line was no more than a few dozen feet away, surrounded by a crowd of witnesses wildly clapping, clanging their cow bells in victory for men and women they didn’t even know.    “I had no idea how close I was,” Bill said, “and suddenly I was  there.”

 

 

 

When we married on that clear October day 32 years ago, we made vows to each other, promising to love, honor and cherish, in sickness and in health, in rain and fog and other crazy endeavors.  Those are profound threads that strengthen a marriage.  But there is another that through the years has made our bond strong:  cheering one another through those tough races of life, both literally and figuratively, being there for one another in our wild pursuits and our everyday toil, coming alongside, and verbally encouraging from the sidelines.  If you recall from my marathon last spring, Bill stood in a frigid rain handing me a Snickers and an encouraging word every six miles of my journey.  Relationships are nourished by how we cheer.  Not “I’m proud of you,” like you would tell your three-year-old when he awkwardly kicks a ball, but “I so respect you for what you are doing.”  Cheering is a verbal acknowledgement of love, a thread that keeps us going strong, a little encouragement that travels a long and winding road.