THE CAVERN OF DEEP HARMONY

PART EIGHTY-FOUR:

"I'm hungry," Eden announced.

"For what?" Marshall asked, grinning as he finished rebuttoning his shirt.

"For something I've dreamed of ever since I first heard of this house."

"I thought we'd done that. Several times."

"Oh, yes, and it was very good, too!" she laughed, reaching over to tickle his chest. "But I have something else in mind."

"Yes...?"

"Something...almost...equally tactile."

"You have my attention."

"But more fattening."

"I'm not fattening in the least," he smiled.

"True. I find you very slimming."

"It's the...exercise...involved."

"Yes, lots. But this, this is fattening."

"What is?"

"What I'm hungry for."

"Um, could you be possibly a bit...specific? Roast pig? A brick of Velveeta?"

"Peanut butter cookies."  She pressed her nose into his cheek.

"Ah!" he said, understanding. "At the big kitchen table...with a wet cloth and a fork?"

"You got it!"

"Now? You want to make cookies now?"

"Can we?"

"I don't see why not," he said, turning his head to kiss her nose.

Together, Wadsworth at their heels, they went into the kitchen. "Where would the peanut butter be kept?" Eden asked as Marshall settled into a chair at the table.

"Second cabinet to the right of the microwave."

Soon she had a large glass bowl out and was happily adding ingredients as Marshall stirred.
"You're such a marvelous stirrer," she purred, kissing his ear. "And so manly as you do it."
He'd gotten flour on his cheek and she thought he looked entirely adorable.

 
When the dough was ready, she spread long sheets of waxed paper atop the table and assembled
everything they would need to make the cookies the way he described they had always done it.
Taking a spoonful of the dough, he rolled it into a neat little ball and set it in front of her.

"Now the glass," he said, and she picked up the juice glass with the small square of wet cloth fastened to its bottom with a rubber band and squished the ball.

"You did this, right?" she asked.

"That was my main job," he smiled, dipping a fork in a small bowl of flour and pressing it twice
across the flattened dough.

They developed sort of an assembly line process and she was fascinated watching his fingers find the dough and deftly press the tines across it first one way and then at right angles. If it weren't for the fact that he wasn't looking down at what he was doing, you'd never have suspected he was doing it all by touch alone. Eden had heated both ovens and soon the smell of dozens of peanut butter cookies filled the large room.

"So familiar...," he murmured, lifting his chin to let his being float in the scent.

Wadsworth thought it smelled wonderful, too, and sat near the table, doggie drool dripping slowly off the tip of his tongue.

 
She came up behind Marshall, sliding her arms around his neck and he raised both hands, cupping them about her forearms. "This is just what I wanted," she whispered.

"You are just what I wanted," he said, leaning his left cheek over onto her arm.

"It's just that this...all this...is such a part of you and there's nothing I want more than to belong to everything that has anything to do with you." She kissed his hair. "You do know you mean absolutely, totally everything to me, don't you?"

He nodded, keeping his cheek on her arm, letting his eyes close, utterly content.

She made a pot of hot tea and they took their cups and a big plate of warm cookies into the living room, cuddling by the fireplace. Breaking off a piece of cookie, she touched it to his lips.

"Open," she said and when he let his lips part, she placed it as gently as a communion wafer on his tongue. His presence in her life did that, took all the ordinary moments and somehow made them holy.

He closed his mouth, keeping the bit of cookie on his tongue, letting the flavor of it fill him. "Here, Marshall darling," his mother's voice said. "This is the first cookie of the batch."  "Hey, Marshy!" Jeffrey laughed. "You got cookie crumbs on your chin!" "I love you," Eden said, unable to resist touching his lips with her fingertips.

His throat constricted with emotion and for a moment he was unable to swallow the cookie. Feeling his lips tighten, she asked quickly, "Are you all right?"

He nodded, managed to get the piece down, and when she moved her hand, said, "There's just so...much...you know, so much that's a part of such a simple thing."

"I know," she replied. And she did.

 
They spent a long time there, close together, drinking the tea, eating cookies. Wadsworth made a little wurffing sound from time to time and Marshall would break off some of his cookie and feed it to him. "You get your teeth brushed today, I hope you know," he laughed, rubbing behind a pointy ear.

Later they put on heavy coats and went out through the kitchen into the back yard, holding onto each other as it was fairly slippery with ice. She wanted to see his willow tree. Carefully they made their way to the far back corner where it grew, had grown since he'd planted it as a boy. The icy snow was somewhat littered in its vicinity with the thin whips that willows lose in the harshness of winter.

"We're here," she said when they'd reached the outer bounds of the branches that draped nearly to the ground.

He slipped off his gloves, probing with both hands, his fingers contacting slender willow branches, completely coated in ice. He smiled, running his hands up and down a long length of them. "Hello, old friend," he murmured.

He led her under the willow, its ice clattering as they moved through layers of drooping branches toward the fat trunk of the tree. He stopped, standing perfectly still, as though listening to some arboreal voice only he could hear. Eden tipped her head up, enthralled. She'd never stood inside a willow in the winter. It seemed to her, in its icy encasement, as though she were in the secret place under a frozen waterfall. It was magical... visual...for her in its glassy and graceful beauty. For him? It must be a different experience for him and she took one of his hands in hers and closed her eyes. The wind blew a thin willow wand against her cheek, a streamer of pure coldness, smooth and wet as her skin melted an outer layer of ice. But with her eyes closed she could better hear the music of the tree its branches made, as like wind chimes they brushed against one another. The gracefulness was no longer visual, but something she was lightly enclosed within...a sense of gracefulness that touched the heart with its invisibility. And this was Marshall, too, she knew. The willow's roots were his roots, connecting him to this place.
 

She breathed slowly, adrift in the shared moment and time didn't so much pass as was lost with no sense of loss. Standing in the middle of perfection was like that. And she knew that without him, without what he brought to her life, she would be still living in poverty of soul. I love you. The words welled within her and yet did not seek verbal expression. Sound, any sound, other than the music of the tree and the beating of her heart, would dispel this moment. And so she simply breathed the words voicelessly, letting them fill her lungs over and over, as she held his hand under the willow.

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