Love Birds

The first time we met, I was riding my bike around campus when I saw John-Paul working in the community garden. It was one of those spring days, and I decided to venture a stop by the garden. I asked what was good to harvest, and he led me to the scallions, and pulled some up for me. I thanked him, and he said, in that slow way of his, that I was welcome, but that next time I would need to get my hands dirty.

I remember sitting out on the porch behind Manor house at Bard with our friend Rupert, working on the website for the brand new Bard Farm. Harriett walked up to us, she remembered me from the summer before, when I was working in the community garden. She invited me to come see her senior project performance that weekend, and I went. After I went to the performance, Harriett sent me a message on facebook thanking me for coming and suggesting that we get a meal sometime. She gave me her number, so I called her, and we ended up talking for a while, just about our families and where we were each from, and the Hudson Valley. We set up a date, after another performance for one of her classes. I sometimes tease Harriett because in that performance she was naked. There was a lot of nudity, actually. So that was kind of funny for a first date. After the performance we went out to dinner, and Harriett was driving, but I saw these irises growing by the Montgomery Place farm stand, and made her pull over. These irises have this crazy potent, almost candy grape smell. I wanted to pick one and have her smell it, because I've just never smelled a flower like that.

After I graduated from Bard, I moved to New York. It was the logical next step for me, pursuing dance. John-Paul was still working the Bard Farm, and pretty much every weekend I'd go up to see him or he'd come down to see me. I have fond memories of riding metro north upstate, the sweet rides in his Volvo from the station in Poughkeepsie, heart full, or meeting John-Paul at Grand Central, waiting on the stairs-- and him arriving with a huge box of vegetables from the farm. It was hard, being long-distance, but it also gave me the space to figure our what I wanted to do, professionally, and what kind of life I wanted for myself. John-Paul came down and lived with me during the winter months, even though he hated being in the city. I remember I would go to my nannying job every morning, and he would go to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, to do research in their library. John-Paul was patient with me while I was sorting through the questions that seem inevitably to crowd a young person after college, and he supported me even when it meant moving away from him.

When I made the move to the Hudson Valley, I started looking at apartment rentals where we could live together-- John-Paul, though, wanted to buy a house. I thought he was crazy. He is crazy. Even so, in August of 2014 we closed on a two-bedroom Victorian in uptown Kingston. We'd had to move out of John-Paul's campus housing at Bard several days before, and had been crashing with friends (we spent at least one memorable night in Paul's writing shack, which was still under construction) while all of our belongings were in a moving truck. After closing, we pulled up the musty carpet in the bedroom, and arranged the couch cushions on the floor into a bed. In the months and years that followed, we tore up carpet, tore down ceiling tiles, tore off masonite wall panels, and dug down to the beautiful old soul of that wonderful house. We lived in the renovation: inventing temporary floors out of cardboard or canvas, washing dishes in a sink held up by 2x4's, living from room to room as we worked. It put a lot of pressure on our young relationship-- juggling graduate school, finances, a new career for me and a growing career for John-Paul while he worked like hell on our house. We were both incredibly stubborn, and would have knock-down, drag-out fights about what color to paint the walls. But there were transcendent moments of togetherness, too, like when, in the midst of my first teaching job, we spent a weekend installing the new plumbing waste lines. There's something about making it through a weekend like that, that brings you closer, welds you together through struggle with PVC cement and peeing in the same five-gallon bucket.

By the time I proposed to Harriett, I'd been thinking about it for a while. We'd been together for seven years, and people were asking me when I was going to do it. Shelley even brought me her mom's (Harriett's grandma's) diamond ring, which Harriett says wasn't meant to pressure me, but... I'd thought about a lot of different ways to propose, but never settled on anything. Around this time I was just finally finishing the work on the house in Kingston, and one day, in June, it was really just putting the finishing touches on. I'd spend the day working on the house and listening to music, and was thinking a lot while I worked. I had this bluegray paint that we were using for the hallway, and I decided that the addition that I'd built, which was all white, could use a nice bluegray sky ceiling, so I brought the paint down there and started to paint the ceiling. I cut in all the edges with the brush, but I knew I wasn't going to have enough to roll out the whole ceiling. It was kind of spur of the moment, I just painted "MARRY ME" across the ceiling. Of course, when Harriett got home from school she walked right in to the addition and sat down to take her shoes off, and then walked right past without noticing it. I came downstairs, and, after realizing she hadn't seen it, steered her away and walked her through the whole house. It was really done! Then when we came back to the mudroom she saw the paint on the ceiling. She just looked at me and said "really?" I said yes, and then she just started crying and we embraced. After we'd sat down in the kitchen she gave me a hard time about not having a ring, and I had to confess that I couldn't find the ring Shelley had given me. I wasn't sure where I'd hidden it. Don't worry, though, I found it, it was in the linen closet, and when I found it Harriett had me get down on one knee.

Even while the Linderman house was still a work in progress, John-Paul had his eyes on the horizon, and, in the summer of 2018, he'd found a magical wooded property on Hallihan Hill in the town of Kingston. It was 16 acres of forest and old bluestone quarry, and his imagination was captured. We closed on the property that December, and began clearing a site for our future home. In 2019, the owner of the two adjacent parcels approached us, and we were able to grow our paradise to 30 acres, and John-Paul designed a smaller, first house perched on the smallest of the three parcels. Ready for our next adventure, we listed the Linderman house in February of 2020, and, in April, our family of four (two of us and two dogs) left that house for a Grand Design 34' travel trailer parked in our woods. By the time we closed, COVID had already forced school closures and had us all sheltering in place. I spent May and June hosting online classes from the camper or teaching ballet via zoom on a sheet of plywood in the woods. After site preparations and some COVID-related delays, we broke ground the day after JP's 35th birthday, on June 10th. That summer, we worked together preparing the foundation and then framing the house. With nothing else to do and JP's characteristic fervor, we worked seven days a week through the summer months, and, in September when I went back to school, JP shifted to an eight day a week schedule. I sometimes think that the most intimate way to be with JP is to be working by his side, fitting into the rhythm of his movements, trying to read his thoughts and keep up. While the house continued to take shape and gain solidity, we celebrated a year's worth of holidays at the little table in our trailer, missing our families but taking comfort in our tiny home.