You Could Be My

I seem to be telling the adventure in backwards order, so: an acorn-shaped gazebo in Silver Spring, Maryland. I'd read about it and asked Andrea if we could check it out. Given that nap time had come and gone by the time we pulled up (the girls scrapping and acting a fool in the seat behind us), Andrea turned on her hazards, and I hopped out of her Exhibition, alone.

The above isn't the best photo, I realize, but the sun was bright, and the gazebo sits just under a large tree. As I walked quickly around the gazebo, I saw just past and below it what looked like a fireplace or some such, and--given the plaque beside--I  went to investigate.

The plaque says (among other things) that this is the Silver Spring from which the community derives its name: that Francis Preston Blair and his daughter Elizabeth discovered it from horseback in 1840, Mr. Blair naming it Silver Spring based upon the appearance of "rays of sun on mica sand particles in the water."

For a spring, it looked dry as a bone to me, but I've been singing bits and pieces of the Fleetwood Mac song in my head, ever since. I looked up its history, last night, and learned: Stevie Nicks wrote the song after driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Spring, Maryland. "'You could be my silver springs...' that's just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me," she explained, once.

I think about my own man: so overwhelmed and tired, lately. The night the little kids and I returned from Maryland, he participated in another mock trial for extra cash, and he's making more repairs on the bitty house, this weekend. We have catching up to do, yet, with bills, Christmas presents to buy. And I know he's worried about his mom: some scary things with her health, lately.

I don't always know what to do or say; in fact, today, he told me to stop talking. But I think about that bone-dry-looking spring and--upon considering what its name symbolizes to Stevie Nicks--decide not to dwell on what Jim could be (or is) to me, right now, but instead, on what I can be to him. I undress and tuck myself in against the prominent bones rising from his chest. I run my hands over his warm body but say not a word.

I would be your only dream...

Your shinin' autumn...ocean crashin'...