Rory FitzgeraldAs I write, my wife is in the kitchen chopping vegetables, while somehow keeping our six-month-old baby daughter happy. The older two sit each side of me on the sofa, where I balance my laptop, homework, crayons and a colouring book.
The annual St Valentine’s Day extravaganza is passed, with its notions that love is shown by extravagant romantic gestures and fancy gifts. Yet true love is utterly unglamourous. It’s getting up in the middle of the night to change a dirty nappy. It’s making the kids’ lunches for school when it’s not your turn.
Yet the prosaic realities of married love stem from its power: it multiplies itself, bringing new people into being. Its fruit carries on through generations, and through time.
The question asked on bended knee is merely the spark that lights a slow-burning fire, more ordinary, yet more profound, than the bright spark that lit it. Yet I vividly remember asking that life-altering question, seven years ago this weekend.
We drove along country roads with the roof open. There were new flowers, bright against winter’s stark woods; there was cold air, pale sunlight and music on the radio. And so we arrived in an ancient place, Gougane Barra, where the mountains part and rise tall above. They stand guard, protectors of a calm lake, in which there is a sacred island. A place where the spirit of God draws near and things seem brighter and more alive than usual.
White forms
“Two swans,” she said quietly, looking across at their perfect white forms, bright on the dark lake water, shining white against the heath and rock. Just then, like a painting coming to life, they stretched their necks forward and surged in motion, taking to the air. They flew across the lake, each wingbeat in perfect unison, and landed, gliding gently to rest, together.
I remembered that they stay bound to one other for their lifetimes, and said so. She smiled as we walked on, past the stones of the old monastery, past holly trees and lapping lake water. Then we stopped for some reason, and in an unforgettable moment I saw her as I never had before. It felt like coming home.
Everything in me cried out to ask her then. But I hesitated, like a nervous jumper on the high dive. And so we walked slowly to the chapel, where we went in out of the cold. I lit a candle and we sat in the silence, I nearly trembling.
In the warm candlelight, a softly murmuring breeze came from beyond. She smiled and I saw her shine. That feeling flooded me once more. When our eyes met, the words came: “Will you marry me?”
Six months later, we married in that very same chapel.
That question marked a beginning.
Looking back on that beautiful moment, we seem like innocents, for we are now seven years wiser. That small moment has since brought three beautiful new people into the world, creating a family whose warm flame we tend, together.