A Golden Day With My Husband

Wednesday was a very special day for me! I got to go along with Jonathan to his work. I had been getting too lonely for him what with him working 12 to 14 hour days, and I was also needing a little break from homeschooling, what with all the groans and growls related to Algebra I and grammar. So I hurried to cook us a picnic lunch, leaving the extra for the children, leaving school and work assignments with the children and letting them free otherwise, and hopped into Jonathan's truck (after helping to clean out the passenger seat).

After picking up material at Home Depot and dropping it at one place, we went to another and were there a while where Jonathan had to oversee replacing a bathroom sink and vanity top issue. And from there we went about 20 minutes on up the road to another job site where Jonathan is doing a bid. At that spot in the mountains, there are all these beautiful aspens on the hillside. While Jonathan finished something on the phone, I scouted around for a log to sit on to eat our picnic.

    Everywhere I walked, it seemed there were these beautiful, rounded yellow leaves, like golden coins!

I told Jonathan that even had those leaves been coins, I couldn't have felt more happy and content! I am so happy walking in the woods in the autumn leaves with my husband! I just revel in this simple beauty!

So there we ate our lunch, under a blue sky clouded a bit by smoke from the fire that we learned later was exploding on the border of Wyoming and coming down into the mountains of our own state. But it was just the two of us there, noticing not so much the smoke as the quiet beauty of the aspen and pines around us.

I was so thankful for a little chance to be in the woods and spend time with my dear hubby whom I miss dreadfully most of the time!

Here were some of those golden leaves caught in the pine branches--like golden blessings floating down from heaven--blessings of relationship and fellowship and beauty and quietness and peace and family and health and sunshine and love and a pleasant day!

Like the blessings of forgiveness--we had needed to forgive each other a few days earlier, and this little excursion meant a lot to me. I had been missing trees and leaves, and I had been missing time with Jonathan, and so to spend the day going to work with him with a little picnic under the aspen in the middle of the day was a perfect way to spend the day!

I tried to tuck the memories into my heart like I tucked a few golden leaves inside the pages of my Bible to press for my little girl to make bookmarks with. And then I drove Jonathan's truck down the mountain and around a stuck stop-light while he worked on invoices on his computer. Then he had to pick up a bobcat and take it all the way down south to not far from Pueblo where his crew is working at putting in foundations for three houses almost at once.

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 We had come here a few days earlier when I had to take Jonathan to town to pick up his truck at the mechanic. Then we had left my vehicle at the edge of town while I went with him to drop a bobcat the first time near this foundation.

Now we were staying all evening with a different rented bobcat, moving dirt from one foundation place to a second one, filling one dump trailer load after another in the sunset.

I decided to spend the time doing a prayer walk, walking all around the property, around and around, praying, until I remembered that this was the property where one of Jonathan's work guys had been digging the crawlspace and dug into a rattlesnake nest. He had seen at least five rattlesnakes jumping from his bobcat or excavator shovel! Suddenly, I was not thinking so much about praying as about keeping my eyes on the ground to watch for rattlesnakes!

Before long, it was getting darker and darker. As soon as the dump trailer was full, we pulled it to the other property a mile or two down the road and dumped it down there. Except that the dump trailer's battery that ran the hydraulics went dead. So Jonathan had to find a battery charger cable that stretched from the trailer battery to the truck battery, and I had to stand at the hood of the truck, holding this cable onto the battery so that it wouldn't fall off. No problem! I was happy to make myself useful and watch my hardworking, capable husband operating the dump trailer and truck.

This is actually a picture of a sunset at home, but oh, well. The smoke from fires has been giving us especially colorful sunsets. I watched the orange moon rise that night while Jonathan filled the dump trailer for a third time.

Back home the children were all over the place, some running errands in town, one going to a Bible study, etc. 

But me--I was spending time with my hubby, and it was so worth it. It was filling up a spot in my heart that has been getting kind of empty and lonely. 

That was the same day that something I posted on Facebook about the presidential debate got shared about 365 times and counting, but as surprising and exciting as that was, it didn't hold a candle to just the delight of spending the day with the man who means the most to me in the whole wide world!