Taking time to reconnect in an unexpected location
This weekend was amazing. My husband convinced me to do something I do only very rarely: take a vacation day from work.
I left early Thursday and didn’t work Friday in order to travel to central Pennsylvania with him to attend a swap meet for car parts. The prospect of spending three whole days away from our responsibilities and with only one another was inviting, even if I wasn’t super sure about the rest of it.
I wasn’t super sure about was the whole, “three days of looking at car parts” thing.
Let me be honest, while there was a day when I changed alternators and brakes on my vehicles, that ship has sailed. I wouldn’t know how to do much with the engine system on my current car, and it was never really about interest as much as it was about affordability and necessity anyway.
The idea of walking miles and miles up and down rows of tables holding what I imagined would be predominantly rusty nuts and bolts, trying to find the proper fender clip or motor bracket for a car that was made decades before my birth held very little appeal to me. Still, I figured there would be some decent food available, so I was willing to give it a go.
Oh, and my husband was incredibly excited, and that has a tendency to be contagious.
We spent two – very long – days at the event.
I walked as slow as I could make myself go while my husband asked if I was running away from him. I could have made it from one end of each aisle and back in 15 minutes, pointing and yelling, “Rusty, rusty, overpriced, junk” at each table, but he felt such behavior would be frowned upon. Instead, we moseyed from booth to booth, picking up items, bickering over prices, and generally behaving how I believe car enthusiasts behave at such places.
If I can give you a clear depiction of how much I was enjoying the flea market by the second day, I parked myself with my laptop at the main food pavilion and logged in to work to continue preparing for an upcoming internal audit. That held more appeal than looking over 500 more strips of chrome window frame, window winder handles, or carburetors.
Our evenings are what made the trip so wonderful.
We ate leisurely dinners at local establishments, people-watched, watched television together, talked for hours and laughed. So often in our 20 years together, it has seemed like we’ve been traveling in opposite directions to meet our common goals. It has seemed like we’ve been so focused on the outcome that we’ve forgotten to enjoy the process.
But this past weekend, we just enjoyed one another’s company.
With no one and nothing else to distract us, we simply connected again. We remembered that before all the responsibility, the kids, the work, and yes, even before the cars, there was just two people in love.
It was wonderful to remember that we still are.