A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
—from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald

I sat on the floor of my boyfriend’s apartment in Chicago this morning listening to the Dixie Chicks sing “Cowboy, Take Me Away,” a song I have not listened to for ages and ages. I’d been washing our lunch dishes when it came on. I moved to the floor to be closer to the sound with a sopping wet dishtowel in my hands.

I said I want to touch the earth
I want to break it in my hands
I want to grow something wild and unruly
I want to sleep on the hard ground in the comfort of your arms
On a pillow of blue bonnets and a blanket made of stars

Oh it sounds good to me
Yes it sounds so good to me …

I want to walk and not run
I want to skip and not fall
I want to look at the horizon and not see a building standing tall
I want to be the only one for miles and miles
Except for maybe you and your simple smile

It’s a commonplace that there are songs that strike you, arrest you, stop you in your tracks. And in the midst of too much media, too much sound and stimulation of late, I encounter that feeling more infrequently than I used to.

When it was first released, I used to listen to that song in my ex-husband’s red Ford Explorer driving to work. I used to wish I could sing it to him and mean it. But I did not mean it. We would neither of us, ever be that for the other.

And then about a year after we were married, a friend of mine had the song played at her own wedding as the processional. She laughed as they walked out. Her husband laughed back. They were happy. They meant what they had said. At their wedding, I sat on the same row as my husband, several seats removed. We were not speaking. Just one year in, and he was already long absent. He’d been late for the wedding, and out the night before, and had spent half my monthly salary on drinks with friends of his I did not like.

I cried through the entire ceremony, partly out of gratitude for the happiness my friend, who I loved. Partly for out of gratitude for the way her happiness seemed to reach out and buoy me, to buoy all of us who witnessed it. I watched them smile through the fog of my own disappointment, through the bitter haze of resignation and an already depleted will.

I sat on the floor of my boyfriend’s apartment this morning in Chicago, a city I left seven years ago alone.

While I listened to the song, crying, my boyfriend walked toward the kitchen, his hair wet from the shower, bringing with him the smell of soap and warm skin, and he startled me. I quickly resumed washing the dishes, and he laughed at how easily I startle, how a bit embarrassed, I suddenly jumped up and began rinsing a glass.

I cried for many reasons this morning. I cried because I was moved. I cried because I am learning with surprising success and authenticity to build a new life now with a strong, good man who is and has been for me everything the song seemed to represent back then—simplicity, contentment, stillness, a shield against the cold, hard ground, a wildness that beckons me out of myself and back to myself at the same time, a kindred soul.

Now I am sitting in front of a window facing the rocky North Shore of Lake Michigan. Just thawed as spring approaches, the white lips of the waves curl fiercely against jagged stone. I sat here years ago with books frantically prepping for class, feeling the unharnessed power of wind with a touch of inland salt, feeling a bit fierce and wild myself.

It’s a bit of a cliché that every girl craves a cowboy, every bit as much as it’s a cliché that you can sometimes fall apart when a love song you used to know comes on the radio.

I don’t know if it’s so much about girls wanting cowboys, as it is about girls craving a companion for what’s fierce and wild within themselves. Girls crave someone who calls out to the West in them. Girls want someone who takes them out walking, who even occasionally takes them by the hand.

Ben is a normal enough guy—occasionally awkward, occasionally melancholy, occasionally withdrawn. We have normal enough disagreements, disappointments, normal and frequent enough fights.

But I sat on the floor of his simple white walled apartment this morning, a place that feels almost holy in its singleminded lack of clutter. A single clay pottery mug. A handful of old silverware. Only a picture or two of an old tree, framed. Pictures of the Cliffs of Moher and an ancient Irish castle. A couple icons. Handcarved pieces that look so unmistakably like him. Wood shavings in corners of the floor. Good, simple food in the pantry. Sports magazines on the floor. Books that are as varied as his interests: spirituality, poetry, music, baseball, food, hockey, wilderness, sailing. His television draped in a brown blanket. Yellow daffodils, brought in for me, blooming in a vase by the window.

Much as my fearful, jaded, bruised heart usually resists the happy ending siren songs of self-help narratives, I have found on the rocky shores of Lake Michigan of my former life a present I thought I would never possess: a reality that beggars any previous fantasies—a happy, simple life. And I am bowed down and made almost mute with the extravagance of this utter grace.

Oh, it sounds good to me. Yes, it sounds so good to me.

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