It’s been some time.

Nathanael and I were married on July 31, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at Diamond Lake Lutheran Church. Fr. William C. Sisterman of The Anglican Church of St. Dunstan, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, presided. We used the Order for Matrimony from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and used the unabridged version of ‘The Lorica of St. Patrick’, and ‘Be Thou My Vision’ for congergational hymns. The reception was at the Fort Snelling Officers Club. The first song we danced to was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘No More Shall We Part’. I danced with my father to The Magnetic Fields ‘Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing’. After being stranded in Detroit, Michigan at the airpirt Westin for lack of identification, we honeymooned in Old Quebec City and stayed in a local hotel, a socialist hotel, another local hotel, and an old Victorian hotel across from an Ursuline convent. I was reading Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain at this time; it did quite a number on my head. There exists a picture of me trying to escape to the convent from the roof top of a Victorian hotel, but I doubt it shall ever get published. We did a lot of exploring the old city on foot, eating at various restaurants and pubs, went to a low mass in a cathedral (which was boggling) and bought some local art, a painting of nuns in the winter street, and a miniture etching of the Ursuline convent, a dark red vase, and an admirable black hat which I’ve since lost in a pub in Atlanta. We flew back to Mobile, Alabama, and drove down to Valparaiso, Florida, which exists in the middle of nowhere. ‘Exists’ might be too strong of a word. Valparaiso’s exsistence, I find, is nothing very definite.

We live in a two bedroom cottage that we’re renting from Nathanael’s step-grandmother. Nathanael works at Eglin Air Force base as a contract engineer, working on ‘defensive’ weapons of some sort, but that’s about all I’m allowed to know. Bi-monthly, in an attempt to keep him honest, I make him promise that he’s not doing anything violent and evil, and he gives his word. He started his masters a week ago at the University of Florida; we’re looking at moving in about five years: we’ve discovered I belong to the city and the cold. I’m a housewife and do the usual, along with reading, taking long walks by the bayou and incessantly debating in my head the whether to write, working on finishing Latin, drinking a fair amount of tea, and correcting the jail’s Bible study assignments to help the chaplin (which is something we’ve just begun). After Latin is done away with, I shall, I think, take a masters in medieval history, with an emphasis on the church. We attend Trinity Presbyterian Church, where N. has gone all his life, which is close enough to walk to some Sunday mornings when the weather is not too muggy and otherwise disheartening. I honestly cannot remember what denomination of which they are a part, but it’s something outrageously small.

Speaking of N., he shall be home soon and I ought to get lunch ready. Wedding photographs to come soon, tonight, I hope.

Other: Here is a collection of religious sonnets, Raised in a Barn 4, edited by Masha Poyurovsky, Jerah S. Kirby and Matthew Kirby. In other words, what J. Campbell described as “The great iamb versus the great I AM.”