Lifeline — Poetry Prompt
One Resolution Remains True
welcome a new year without reservation
Newly married only three months and the end of the year was upon us.
Let’s write our New Year’s Resolutions says, my beloved. Whoa, dear one, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.
Wide-eyed, in love he seeks to convince me as he convinced me to give us a try, to move across the country, to leave a career, and home and, finally, to marry.
What powers of his vast repertoire of persuasion would come this day? As we sit around a table in his comfy townhome, not quite mine yet.
Let me show you, my darling, he coos as his little red notebook is presented. Oh, is that leather? Red leather? Noted, it is a gorgeous notebook befitting my Marine Lieutenant, stalwart and true, of magnificent blue eyes to my hazel, in which I find his appeal.
Simple. Ten things. What do you want to accomplish this year? A tilt of my head, unsaid, the answer is held. Nothing, but to be with you, to start anew, to learn this place of mountains and snow, of canyons and wildflowers of pine and aspen, of you.
That is my ten things, all my counting of things are you.
Proudly, he sets his goals before me. Quite ambitious, concise, thoughtful. They are as he is.
Of course, I relent, into the first of a million things we would do together. In laughter, we question each goal.
It is sublime to sit in wonder of his intricate mind as he takes each one of mine apart and then into his heart.
Yet, I remind him Whoa, dear one, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.
So, in the besotted comfort that created our profound joy in the humor that built our life together, it only took five years for those blue eyes to shine when he discovered I wrote the same thing. Every year.
Forty years on one resolution remains true. Unspoken, unwritten, renewed. To be with you in laughter in love in mountains and snow still chasing our dreams through the wildflowers together.
Whoa, dear ones, I don’t do new year’s resolutions. Of course, I can craft goals and the steps to get there. Yet, for a new year, I am excited to go forward, to hold true one resolution. May your resolutions be joyful, optimistic, and maybe even the same ones from a year ago. We live on.