Basically Beavers

Friendship in marriage

It is a rainy day, and on rainy days I do my best remembering.

I am remembering the rainy day five years ago, when my husband and I were dating. He was over at our house, and I guess my parents were wanting to get rid of us, because as we all stood in the kitchen my dad looked out the window towards the pond and said, “Well that spillway has broken, and it needs to be fixed. Ya’ll think y’all can do that?”

“You mean like right now?”

“Yeah, it’s going to keep raining for days. Now’s as good time as any.”

It was pouring. But I guess he knew we needed a project to keep us out of trouble, and we saw the truth in that too. So we got on our boots and raincoats and headed out, down the slick steps and across the big dam to the broken spillway.

I remember that Andrew just kinda paced for a few minutes once we got there, and I thought he was as clueless as I was. But then he walked up to me and told me what needed to be done, which was to cut out all the water iris in the way, and build a dam strong enough to hold the heavy flow of water which was breaking the spillway down. We would have to get in the pond to do this, which didn’t really matter because we would be soaked by the rain soon enough.

After he explained this I remember I was like, Welp, it’s a no-go then. Impossible. Let’s go. But then I realized that he was already getting started. I think I even said something like, we’re not really doing this are we? To which he replied, we’re going to need a couple pick axes and shovels. (That was just the beginning of my long career of running to get things for that man.)

We worked for hours. We took off our cumbersome coats and worked past the cold and beyond our hunger. For a few minutes, I remember it felt romantic and even sexy, but that quickly passed. He wasn’t thinking like that. He was too busy doing the work, and in time, I was too. At one point he looked up at me grinning like a kid. “We’re basically beavers,” he said.

And so we built a dam that day. We built it with little trees and big sticks and covered it over with mud thatched deep in grassroots. We laid the Iris blades over the top of it, just for looks. And it held back the raging water and it kept us out of trouble.

But more than that, it was just one of many days that made us friends. It’s a familiar truth that to be friends with someone you need to work together, to have a shared mission and purpose, at the very least an interest. But it can be hard to manufacture this. It comes best when it comes naturally, surprisingly. We learned that being friends was just as fun as being lovers, and often a lot more useful. We learned that we could depend on each other in challenges which seem to come up frequently in real life, and which modern dating often fails to adequately portray. Not that building dams in the rain is something we do every day, or even a single day since…

But sometimes in the evening when the baby wants to cluster feed and it’s dinnertime and half of the food ends up on the floor and everyone needs baths and the bedtime routine is less than pleasant with fussy kids who “aren’t tired” in a house that is somehow still a mess despite my best efforts, I remember that day we stood waist deep in the pond and worked in the rain. I remember that I thought we couldn’t do it, but we did. I remember that I didn’t give up because he didn’t. And I figure if we made a dam together, surely we can make a home too.

After all, we are basically beavers.