Morning Walks

March 21, 2025 – Michael and I walk every morning at sunrise.  Every morning for 14 months now we converse around Balboa Island between the homes and harbor.

I can’t help but feel like we are in a walk-and-talk movie scene with the beautiful backdrop of the morning clouds, sometimes gray and full of rain, and sometimes light wisps across the sky as we move between the seasons; the crew teams skimming the still bay waters and the seagulls, pelicans and gray herons hunting for their breakfasts. Every now and then a barking seal will add to the morning magic.

Michael is 9 years older than I and had been single for 16 years after four kids and a 20 year marriage. I was only 18 months out of my 27 year marriage and still very much healing when we met for lunch at A’s on a Saturday in January. My goal was simply to “begin again”; falling in love was not anywhere on my radar. But that’s when they say it happens, right?  When you are looking the other way. 

Over the months, as we walk and talk, he has helped me process and move through the final stages of grief and humiliation. He has supported and guided me through my fear and emergence into my new personhood and my new  life ….. all at the same time that we were falling in love. 

On our “peripatetic” walks, as Michael likes to call them, we have spoken with reverence about the magic and mystery of falling in love and our own story. We have lamented and reinvented the concept of marriage as we imagined our own future together; talked about my two homeschooled teenagers and the microschool that I inadvertently have found myself running.  He helps me sort out how to best guide them through these tender years: socially,  academically and emotionally. We dig into how the divorce is affecting them and we plot together the best way to s-l-o-w-l-y integrate him into my home life and we analyze every tiny interaction he has with the kids for clues as to how it is going.  

We also spend a fair amount of time sharing ourselves with each other – our histories, our highs, our lows, our dreams, desires and goals. And most essential to our future together, how we need and want to grow individually and together. 

I am not writing because I think any of this is unique to me. Michael and I joke about how cliche and tropish aspects of our lives are. I am writing this blog to document and remember our thoughts, ideas and musings for my own menopausal brain. And for anyone else who might be having a similar journey and, like me, finds solace and inspiration in other people’s journeys, knowing that we are not alone in our highs, our lows, and all the grappling in between. 

But on a Wednesday in a cafe
I watched it begin again
-Taylor Swift

xo,

Renee