Of Garden Roses and Name Changes

I spend all morning at the social security office and at the DMV(s). I go armed with a Texas driver's license, a passport, a birth certificate, a marriage license, two proofs of residency, forms filled out, and find, once again, bureaucracy is all about that inconvenience. A name change is all I get after several hours in lines and in traffic. (Tell me again why they don't put all of the DMV services in just one building?) A whole day off feels thwarted when I finally get home, plus I'd forgotten to drink coffee in the morning. I slump in our estate sale chair and sulk silently to myself: nothing about this season feels like it's easy. The first three months of our relationship, pre-marriage, were brimming over with blessing, but also ease, in some ways. God just felt so faithful and so surprisingly good around every corner. But the last three months—post marriage, post move, post new church/job/community/city—sometimes I wake up in the morning and want to bury my head back in the pillow. It's all so much new.

I tell a friend today I've finally decided to give myself a year to acclimate. If, after a year, I can feel like myself in just one of these new identities, I will consider it a win.

I make coffee, open a cookbook, and get under a blanket to read. Something about food and traditions makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. Our daily rituals together: French press in the mornings, breakfasts of eggs (three for him, two for me) and sweet potato hash, some sort of fruit and greens, sometimes bible reading, and then again at night, slicing vegetables, browning meat, setting the table, lighting the candles. These are the times I feel most myself, and most like someday all of this new and foreign will feel as comforting as the sliced cherry tomato on the wooden cutting board or the amount of time I know it takes to make a perfect steak on the cast iron. These are rudimentary things, but sometimes it is the comfort of the small things.

I page through the cookbook and find a garden rose in it from six months ago, when he first brought me flowers he picked from his garden. They were in a short Mason jar and I knew I would love him forever then. Has it really been six months? Forever is such a very short time and such a long time too.

I know these months of transition are only months, and soon a year, five years, ten will have passed before I know it. I want to slow time sometimes, still it, just to remember, but I also want to speed time, run through it, because it is so hard. We miss our friends and our community, the people who love us best. We miss laughing hard and loud and deep and long, and beers out on the back porch. We miss being known. We are our best friends and favorite persons, but we miss who we are when it's not just us.

Today my name changed from Lore Ann Ferguson to Lore Ann Wilbert and he came and sat down beside me on the estate sale chair: "Thank you for taking my name," he said, and I said, "Of course, what other name would I ever want to take?" And it occurs to me that a name change is a very small thing that takes a very long time to grow accustomed to. So too with life here, I suppose. What is a new address? Nothing, really, but also it is everything too.